Vulkan Lives

Seriph, Remembrancer

Verace, Remembrancer

Caeren Sebaton, Frontier archaeologist

From scorched earth…

‘Vulkan lives.’

Two words. Two grating words. They closed around me like a rusty trap, snaring me with their savage teeth. So many dead… No, slain. And yet…

Vulkan.

Lives.

I felt each one reverberate inside my skull like a triphammer striking a tuning fork, pressing at my temples, every syllable pulsing headache-red. They were little more than a mocking whisper, these two simple words, mocking me because I survived when I should have died. Because I lived, they did not.

Surprise, awe, or perhaps it was the simple desire not to be heard that made the speaker craft his words so quietly. In any case, the voice that gave utterance to them was confident and full of undeniable charisma.

I knew its cadence, its timbre, as familiarly as I knew my own. I recognised the voice of my gaoler. And I, too, rasped as I declared it to him.

‘Horus…’

For all my brother’s obvious and demonstrative puissance, even in his voice, I could barely speak. It was as if I’d been buried for a long time and my throat was hoarse from swallowing too much dirt. I had yet to open my eyes, for the lids were leaden and stung as if they’d been washed out with neat promethium.

Promethium.

The word brought back a sense memory, the image of a battlefield swathed in smog and redolent of death. Blood saturated the air. It soaked the black sand underfoot. Smoke clung to ba

I saw Ferrus die, even though I wasn’t present at his murder, but in my mind I saw it. We had a bond, he and I, forged in more than fraternal blood. We were too alike not to.

This was Isstvan V that I saw. A black, benighted world swarmed by a sea of legionaries bent on mutual destruction. Battle tanks by the hundreds, Titans roaming the horizon in murderous packs, drop-ships flooding the sky and choking it with their death-smoke and their engine fumes.

Chaos. Utter, unimaginable chaos.

That word had a different meaning now.

Further snatches of the massacre returned to me. I saw a hillside, a company of battle tanks at the summit. Their ca

Armour cracked. Fire rained. Bodies broke.

I charged with the Pyre Guard, but they soon lost pace with me as my anger overtook my capacity for reason. I hit the tanks on my own at first, like a hammer. With my hands I tore into the line of armour, battered it, roaring my defiance at a sky drenched crimson.

As my sons caught up to my wrath, light and fire arrived in the wake of my assault. It tore open the sky in a great strip of blinding magnesium white. Those nearby shut their eyes to it, but I saw the missiles hit. I watched the detonation and beheld the fire as it spread across the world like a boiling ocean.

Then there was darkness… for a time, until I remembered waking, but dazed. My war-plate was burned. I had been thrown from the battle. Alone, I staggered to my feet and saw a fallen son.

It was Nemetor.

Like an infant I cradled him, raising Dawnbringeraloft and crying out my anguish for all the good it would do. Because no matter how much you wish for it, the dead do not come back. Not really. And if they do, if by some fell craft you can restore them, they are forever changed. Revenants. Only a god can bring back the dead and return them to the living, and we had all been told that gods did not exist. I would come to understand the great folly and undeniable truth of that in the time that followed.

My enemies reached me in a flood, stabbing with knives and bludgeoning with clubs. Some were midnight-clad, others wrapped in iron. I killed almost three score before they took Nemetor from my arms. And as I knelt there, bruised and bleeding, a shadow fell across me.

I asked, ‘Why, brother?’

And these next words were freshest in my memory, because of what Curze said as he loomed over me.

‘ Because you’re the one who’s here.’

It wasn’t the answer I was expecting. My question had a much wider meaning than what Curze took it to be. Perhaps there was no answer, for isn’t it inevitable that one day a son will rebel against his father and desire to succeed him, even if that succession meant committing patricide?