Lord of the Night

He brought them to where the hulk of a drilling behemoth pitched like a rusted island from the sludge of an oily ocean, lost to the shadows. He guessed that at one time it had dug these basins and caves, these rustmud caverns, a swarm of humanity building and settling in its wake. And here it had faltered — perhaps blunted by its labours or else merely forgotten, with none caring to settle so deep — and rotted in its own fuel, drowned in the snow that its exertions had melted, with only its massive loins rearing from its caldera like a tombstone.

Here Sahaal had hidden his cache of weapons and ammunition, and here he brought his children, his black-draped tribe, on their exodus from the Steel Forest.

The Shadowkin crossed the thick waters and tried to ignore the silvery fronds that moved in the deep, and settled upon the island without comment. Their lord had won a great victory, he had driven the heretic interlopers from their cherished lands — why then must they leave those lands behind? Why must they come to this blighted place?

And in low voices, in muffled hisses that they didn't dare imagine he could hear, they asked: How was he struck down so easily by the witch? Was he not supposedly mighty? Could he not have crushed her with ease?

Sahaal issued two tasks to his tribe, before even they hunted and fed their children. The first was that they dispatch scouts into the shadows, to listen to rumour and collect gossip, and to bring to him the man named Slake. He commanded this without explanation, and those warriors thus selected scattered into the night without question.

His second command was that they build him a throne.

For all that he considered his command above dissent, Sahaal was no fool, and as his tribe worked with bone and rag to fashion a fitting seat for their lord, their prayers seemed muted, their prostrations halfhearted, and their anxious glances of fear betrayed the simmering glut of resentment. Sahaal took it all in and stored it away, but could not bring himself to be troubled. The Night Lords commanded obedience, not affection, and whether these scum liked him or not was irrelevant. They would do what he told them, and that was enough.

They built the throne from the crippled spars of the great digger, sealed in improvised forges, and covered the seat in furs of black and brown. The arms and back they topped with stolen bones and teeth, a skull upon each hand pommel and freshly-taken heads — those of slain vindictors they had brought with them — mounted on spines above die whole. Sahaal found their grim iconography gratifying: they, like his ancient Legion, understood the power of morbidity and the fear that went along with it. That they devoted their gruesome trophies to the glory of the Emperor was the one sour note in an otherwise pleasing practice.

He ascended his throne with no small measure of pride, and as the Shadowkin dispersed to tend to their own needs he lost himself in the memories of glories that had long since passed, never once pausing to consider the dissatisfaction of his people.

On Tsagualsa, the carrion world, the Legion had raised a palace for its lord.

He had gathered his captains together, and they came with a fleet of bladed prows and bitter warriors, skulls displayed at belt and shoulder, scriptures crossed through with bloody ink.

Horus was dead. The heresy that had looked ready to rip the bloated Imperium apart had ground to a halt. The Legions that had turned from the Emperor and sided instead with Chaos, that boiling fount of madness and disorder, were scattered, licking their wounds, bemoaning their losses, running for their lives.

Not so the Night Lords!