Fire Warrior

“The shrine...” he grunted, supporting himself on the wall. “Shoot the shrine!”

If Ardias doubted the bizarre advice he gave little sign of it, spotting the lurid green antechamber and stomping inside with a scowl. Kais heard the unmistakable rattle of bolter fire from within and, for the third time, the glowing cord of sustaining energy faltered.

Shakily he raised his gun, gratified by the daemon-lord’s gyrations, and took aim. The railgun’s breathless reports merged bizarrely with the sharp hammering of the Space Marine’s weapon: a chorus of punitive destruction that blasted great slabs of rotten meat from the writhing daemonform and sent lurid streamers of infectious waste cascading through the gloom. Bored out by railgun rounds, the monstrosity detonated along its spine to a series of vengeful bolter shells and lay still, pools of sludge draining from its ragged shanks.

“For Ultramar!” Ardias cried, clashing his pistol against his chest. Ave Imperator!

He turned to face Kais, features bisected by a feral grin.

“You don’t understand...” Kais muttered, suddenly overwhelmed by tiredness and pain. “There’s one m—”

Red light filled the cavern.

The fourth aspect lifted up behind Ardias.

He never knew what hit him.

Tarkh’ax scrabbled for vengeance. Its formidable manifestation was denied it. Each in turn, its dark gods had turned their unkind faces away, disappointed in its performance.

Only one remained, now. One last chance at revenge. One last chance to crush the fleshy maggots that had brought it so low.

“Mighty Khorne!” the daemonlord raged into the warp, sensing the bloodlust rising in its consciousness, feeling the fleshshape coalescing around it. “Deliver me into form!”

And Khorne delivered.

And it all came back to Kais.

(In the mundanity of reality, the Space Marine hit the wall and crumpled to the ground, flicked aside by a nonchalant swipe of one armoured gauntlet.)

He’d killed so much, this rotaa. He was a broken knife, hewing at flesh and sawing through bones. He’d faced more than any Fire Warrior should face in a lifetime.

(The daemonlord unfolded to its full height, wiry form clad now in colossal armour, articulating with the blade-edged rasp of metal on metal.)

He’d been lucky, there was no doubt of that. But there was skill there, too. A skill that would never flourish beneath the restrictions of the tau’va. A skill born in enjoyment and savagery: utterly alien and separate from the Greater Good, but able to serve it, from a distance, nonetheless.

(Its avian features twisted apart, horned and leering, eyes and beak and nostrils blazing with i

He should have died a hundred times over, this rotaa. Was there a cost, he wondered? What price would he pay for such u

(It was an armoured slaughterer, wings shedding the last of their coloured feathers to reveal the black-leather folds of batflesh beneath. It curled its vast knuckles, blood-patina’d chainmail wrapped and stapled to its very flesh, around an axe that dribbled red fluids, threw back its head, and roared.)

Everything balanced, in the end.

(It bled. It bled a sticky crimson carpet from every joint in its armour, from every chain mail link and every jagged co

Equilibrium over excess.

(When it moved, striding forth and raising up that sickly slick blade, as big as Kais himself, the red mist of heat and vapour rising off its gory surfaces followed it like a shroud. A blood veil.)

Cheat death too often, and there’s always a cost.

Kais thought: I’ve paid the price. I’ve killed and killed and killed, and survived, and all it cost me—

Is my sanity.

The butcher daemon cocked its head at the tiny thing before it, stretched out a hand, and let its bloody aura, its dark mantle of shadow and gore, slip out of its fingers and into Kais’s mind. The Mont’au devil came slinking out of its mental shadows. Kais couldn’t resist it now. His consciousness rolled over, his rationality dissolved away into the bloody mire trickling through it, and he surrendered himself utterly, without regret or hope of salvation, to the rage.

His lips had parted before he even knew what he was saying. The air was rising in his lungs. His tongue formed the words without his bidding.

And all he could see in his mind was his father, staring down from his moral highground, spewing his expectations and judgement upon the youth before him.

Shas’la T’au Kais threw back his head, choked on bitterness, opened his mouth, and screamed: BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!

Red light lifted like lava from the pit, scattering the chittering daemon swarms and filling El’Lusha with nausea. It was an aura of savagery, merciless and insane, and if it was allowed it would swallow the world.

They were ru

“We’re going in,” he said, voice hard.

“Shas’el?” Vre’Wyr’s voice betrayed his terror.

“We’re going in,” he repeated, and stepped over the edge of the pit, jetpack flaring with a whine.

Kais stormed.

Unable to think. Unable to drag any rational thought from a mind occluded behind frenzy, he emptied the railgun of its last precious shots in a cavalcade of energy, neither caring or noticing that each shot achieved nothing, hammering uselessly against the daemon’s slick armour.

The slaughterlord watched in amusement, humouring its miniature attacker, and casually swatted at Kais with its fist. The impact hurled him across the chamber, exploding his breath from his lungs and crippling his right knee. He didn’t care. Pain didn’t matter anymore.

Useless as a ranged weapon, the empty railgun made a perfect bludgeon. Utterly berserk, barely even sentient, only the tormented core of Kais’s mind, where the last fragments of his sense was besieged, recognised the ludicrousness of his attack; hammering at the butcher daemon’s legs, snarling and spitting and dribbling: utterly insane. Unable to properly stand, he staggered and crawled and yelped like a wounded ui’t, unwilling to submit to any premature mercy killing.

He wasn’t fighting any daemonlord. His muscles didn’t ache from his struggle against Chaos, or the gue’la. It was all a lie. All a replacement. All a substitute.

He looked up, and the face that looked down upon him, the face that he battered his gun against and stabbed with his knife and vented himself utterly upon—

Was that of Shas’o T’au Shi’ur.

Kais murdered his father a million times in his mind, and when the daemonlord’s axe hacked off his left arm he barely even noticed. His body gave in. His brain didn’t.

And then there were voices.

“...ais?... Come in Kais?”

He ignored them, wondering abstractly how he could go on killing with only one arm left. He pushed a fist against the stump and squeezed it tight, cyan blood welling between his fingers. The daemonlord cocked its head and laughed and laughed and laughed, watching as its enemy bled across the chamber.

“Kais? Kais, can you hear me?” It seemed to be coming from inside his helmet. This is Lusha. “It’s El’Lusha... We’re on our way, Kais. I know you can hear me! Come in, Kais!”

“You knew my father,” Kais said, not thinking, unable to move. There was blood inside his helmet now, too. He could feel it. “You knew him, didn’t you?”

“Kais?”

“Answer me!”

“What? I... Yes, Kais. Yes, I knew him. I was there when he died. I fought with him for tau’cyrs. Kais — where are yo—”