Fire Warrior

“He was perfect, I suppose.”

“What?”

“He was perfect! Never did anything wrong, I expect. Perfect.”

“Kais, what is th—”

“I’m just an echo, El’Lusha. I see that now. Just a ripple on a pond.”

“Kais, your voice... It’s...”

“All I am, and all I’ll ever be, is a bitter little shadow cast by him.”

There was no reply. Kais couldn’t bring himself to care. Everything seemed to be going slowly, now. There was less colour in the world. Everything was cold.

“Kais. Kais, you listen to me. You know how he died, Kais? You know how your father died?”

“...serving...

“He died because a tyranid y’he’vre put a dent in his battlesuit and he wouldn’t fall back until he’d taken his revenge. He died because he wouldn’t listen when we told him — we all told him — it was time to withdraw! Hot-headed, Kais. He was a son-of-a-ui’t with a temper, and a poor judge of character.”

Something cold opened up in Kais’s mind.

“W-what?”

“He shot a shas’ui, once, just for questioning orders. Did you know that? He was a snae’ta, Kais. A mighty general and a powerful fighter, but a snae’ta nonetheless.”

“But... but the machine...”

That was his genius, child. He understood the machine. It’s the whole thing that matters, not the parts inside. He made his speeches, he blurted his sound bites to keep the por’hui happy. Then he went right back to being an impetuous grath’im.

“Get it into your head, Kais. The tau’va isn’t real. Nobody ever reached it.

“We’re always getting closer, always approaching, but never arriving. As long as we go in the right direction, as long as everything we do is done in the name of the Greater Good— then it doesn’t matter how far from the path you are!

Kais opened his eyes, and everything had changed.

The daemonlord sensed something was wrong. The bloodlust it had gifted to the tau creature was waning. It evaporated like water, unclouding the tiny morsel’s mind and leaving it cold and sharp: a dagger of focus that no amount of insidious corruption could ever penetrate.

It didn’t matter. A pure tau died just as easily as a tainted one.

He watched it struggle with its helmet, single arm scrabbling weakly at the clasps. Tarkh’ax watched in amusement, enjoying its bloody frailty.

Finally the helmet came off, and the tau’s grey features stared up, eyes fluttering against unconsciousness. It wanted to face its death head-on, Tarkh’ax saw. It could respect that, at least.

Riding on the surging bloodlust, filled by Khorne’s brutal patronage, the daemonlord raised its axe.

The tau threw its helmet.

It tumbled across the floor towards the red shrine of the Blood God, and bounced once, twice, three times, coming to rest against the rune-daubed obsidian with its glaring optics staring upwards sightlessly.

Tarkh’ax turned its gaze back upon the dying little creature, perplexed by this bizarre final act of defiance.

The tau smiled.

And the dud bolter shell, buried deep inside the fio’tak of Kais’s helmet for so many exhausting decs, was heated by the play of malefic energies across the monolith.

It detonated with a sooty roar, and the swirling madness that was Tarkh’ax’s link to the butcher god died with a tug of energy. It shrieked its fury to the world, hefting high the axe that would obliterate forever the cringing morsel that had denied it even the smallest of deific patronage, and—

And there was the screaming of jet engines, and the ghostly distortion of anti-grav drives, and bulky shapes falling from the sky with weapons roaring.

Kais kept watching until the battlesuits had used up all of their ammunition and the hulking daemonlord was eradicated from physicality forever.

Then the world went grey.

Then the world went black.

And there was peace.

EPILOGUE

The thing in the warp thought of glory.

It was surrounded by a million, billion of its kind. Frothing and fizzing like spawning fish, ru

In this place of madness a memory was difficult to hold. Thoughts were unfocused, uncontrollable things, impossible to grasp and concentrate upon.

Nonetheless, struggling against the i

A man, who was not a man, stood upon the bridge of a starship and stared at the orb of matter in space before him.

He was a superhuman, or as near to one as it was possible to be — and his skin, which was made of ceramite and plasteel, was blue.

The planet seemed serene from his vantage point: a swollen belly of earth and sand, hidden in shadow, waiting for the morning.

It would not come.

The sensation of teleportation was still uncomfortable to Ardias, and combined with the dangerously high quantities of stimmchem and pain-reductors the apothecary had administered, he was left feeling off-balance and hazy. Since regaining consciousness in the silence of the Chaos pit, he’d had little time to simply stand and stare.

The tau flotilla diminished into the void on the surveyor-screens, watched closely by Captain Brunt and his command crew.

“They’re gone,” a servitor said, quietly.

Ardias pondered briefly upon the xenogens. A young race, by human standards— and dangerous. There was no doubt of that. Their time would come.

“Load torpedoes,” he grunted, returning his attention to Dolumar IV. “Target the Chaos temple.”

The captain knew better than to argue. “With what?” he asked, uneasy at the Ultramarine’s presence. “A bombardment would, I assure you, collapse even the deepest—”

Ardias turned to him with eyes flashing.

“Cyclonic torpedoes,” He said. “Viral bombs. In the name of Emperor and Guilliman, purge the planet.”

And three tau, dressed loosely in fire caste regs, armourless and helmetless, stepped from the heat of daytime T’au into the cool shade of a domed building.

“This way,” El’Lusha said, voice barely a whisper. His clipped steps betrayed the acute discomfort he felt, and his two young companions exchanged a glance, careful to conceal their nervousness. Several fio’vre medics, squat and bright in cream lab coats, scurried between chambers quietly.

The pair followed El’Lusha along snaking corridors, curving architecture cooling their troubled minds and going some way to banishing their fears. Fio’sorral artworks, sweeping frescoes and mandala patterns, bolstered their serenity, so that when they stepped finally into a small antechamber they felt refreshed and ready for whatever was to come.

As if reading their thoughts, Lusha fixed them with a sombre gaze. “You should prepare yourselves,” he said, searching their eyes. “He is different. He was changed by his ordeal.”

He gestured towards a door and a small viewing panel yawned open silently. Shas’ui T’au Ju and Shas’ui D’yanoi Y’hol, newly promoted, swallowed and stepped forwards.

“By the path...” Y’hol hissed, tottering back on his replacement bionic leg in shock. Ju mumbled a calming litany under her breath, dragging thin fingers across her mouth.