Lord of the Night

Should I be angry? his mind mused. Should I suffer this curiosity — this impetuosity — in a creature so frail as this woman?

Should I cut her in two?

His claws began, so slowly that he barely even felt it, to slip from their sheaths. He had not consciously triggered them.

But then... but then...

The priestess's importance could not be understated: to lose her would be to risk losing once more the control of his tribe — and that at this most critical of junctures. For all his might and power he was no diplomat, no empathetic figurehead to safeguard the hopes and fears of a population. His was a diplomacy of terror and carnage, not of words and assurances.

He needed her.

A demonstration, then?

Some painful reprimand, perhaps, to punish her undue curiosity, to teach her — and through her the tribe — that his plans were his alone, that he would not tolerate the prying of peasants.

Chianni noticed the claws and gasped in the silence, perhaps understanding, too late, her mistake.

Yes. Yes, teach her a lesson. Make her bleed. Just a small cut...

It was a voice that came from somewhere deep in his subconscious, and as he focused on it, he saw that it was the same voice that had pushed forth his claws, the same voice that had overwhelmed him as he slew the astropath, the same voice that had brought red haze down across his vision time and time again since his arrival on this blighted world.

Cut her. Cut her, you fool!

Was he mad, then? Was he succumbing to that same random insanity — a thing of brilliance and bitterness — that had consumed his master?

He had long ago forsaken the trust of any other creature... could he now no longer trust his own mind?

He snarled in the silence of his helmet and drowned the voice in his mind, and retracted his claws with a silky rasp, feeling foolish. The priestess swam before his eyes, pale with incomprehension, and it was with a sensation like relief, like a clear water scouring the filth of his psyche, that he broke the silence, focused upon her question, and spoke.

'Why?... Because through them I may find something that was stolen from me. My inheritance.'

'I-inheritance? Something that will help you? Something that will help us?'

He smiled, although of course she could not see it.

'Yes. Something that will aid me.'

'A... forgive me, my lord... a weapon?'

He settled back upon the throne and wet his lips, and was no longer irked by her questions. It felt good to speak of such things, finally. It felt good to leave the vacuum of solitude — however momentary, however falsely. — and remember the glories of his past. What harm could it do? What harm in telling the truth to this eager creature — or at least those parts that would strengthen her loyalty?

What harm in leaving the shadows, for an instant?

'What do you know,' he asked, 'of the primarchs? Of the Emperor's own sons?'

Her bulging eyes were all the answer he needed. He waved away her astonishment and went on.

'There were twenty. Twenty warrior infants, twenty child-gods. Perhaps they were whelped, like human sons. Perhaps he made them, as an artist fashions a masterpiece. Perhaps he simply willed them to life — who knows? What is known is that they were scattered, cast out into the stars like seeds on tilled earth. And in their absence from their father they grew to manhood — each in reflection of the world that had claimed them, each shaped by the people who took them in. The kindness and cruelty of strangers.'

He paused, and in his mind he saw a snow-white baby, rushing through tortured skies, black eyes squinting against clouds and wind, before being swallowed — consumed whole — by the dark.

There was one who fell further, and deeper, than the rest. He came to a world without daylight, where cruelty abounded above compassion, where the only honour was a precarious thing shared amongst thieves and murderers. This child, this feral thing, was raised by no man. No human kindness ever taught him mercy, no mother ever shushed his sleeping terrors. And alone of all the scattered primarchs, all those lost babes, no one taught him wrong from right. Justice from injustice.

'Oh, the beliefs of the other primarchs varied, of course. What is "wrong", or "right", after all? Points of view. As each child grew their sense of righteousness solidified, their concept of what to punish and what to encourage took form, guided by the morality of their tutors or brothers-at-arms. Ultimately the conclusion they drew, whatever their circumstance, was the same: that "right" was whatever they said was right. That "wrong" was whatever they decided to punish.

'Just children, priestess, but already gods to be loved and feared.'