The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

Aquila from the Ashes crashed bodily into the Archimandrite at full stride, shoulder charging the machine with a hammer-blow bang and the choral whine of protesting, warping metal. They stood deadlocked, living machine-flesh against industrial piston-muscles, metal grinding, armour scraping, spraying sparks. Aquila from the Ashes had size and weight against the Archimandrite’s original husk, but the Archimandrite was blasphemously altered now. The fruits of the Fabricator General’s vision and the possessing daemon’s strength shoved back against the taller machine, its taloned feet seeking purchase and clawing into the nameless material of the webway’s ground.

Devram’s cockpit flooded with alarms and warning runes. He felt his suit’s stance buckling as the creatures around his knees began hacking away at his stabilisers. A strained look at one of his torso-feed screens showed the Custodians and Sisters fighting their way to him, but they were fighting through an ocean of heaving, seething flesh with mere mortal blades.

It was down to him. This deed would mark his shield or mark his grave.

Enough left for a four-second burst. Devram forced his gunlimb up, sacrificing his last shot against the beasts around his legs, jamming the gatling cannon into the Archimandrite’s sloping, featureless face. It cycled live, rotating, spinning–

His knee buckled, burst. He fell, the last four seconds of his ammunition screaming wide, arcing up into the golden mist as wasted thunder. The sickening lurch in his stomach told him what the failing pict-feeds didn’t, as his Knight toppled sideways. Impact gel squirted from his support cradle to cushion him but the excretors were poorly maintained; his helmed head slammed against the cockpit wall and something – the wall? his helmet? – crunched.

His visor went black, denying all input. Unseeing, feeling hot wetness in his mouth, Devram fought to pull his helmet clear. Fingers that had turned suddenly clumsy scraped at the helmet’s bindings as all around him metal bent, wrenched, tore.

The pressure of enclosing metal was unrelenting, first squeezing him into his throne, then crushing him into it, breaking his knees, his shoulders, his hips, his elbows, his ribs with vicious slowness. He screamed as he was compacted beneath the Archimandrite’s iron tread, silenced only when his neck and jaw gave with wet, clicking snaps.

3

The creature stepped over the malformed remains of the taller machine, unknowingly crushing Sevik’s hand-painted tilt shield into a mangled ruin. It hunted the Anathema’s Daughters now, and all else was but a distraction.

Its lessers among the weaker Choirs lashed out blindly, unable to even sense the human maidens slaughtering them. The weakest of them all, the most wretched and insignificant within their ranks, dissolved even before the fall of the Daughters’ killing blades.

The daemon of the first murder was prey to no such gullible weakness. It didn’t need to sense them or see them in order to kill them. Its clustered node of hunger-senses flowed outwards over the hundreds of warring bodies, sensing the dissolution of its own kind. Wherever its lessers were drained of their strength, wherever their corpuses haemorrhaged potency, there it turned its guns. Blinded by the Sisters’ soullessness, it hunted the holes in its perceptions, firing streaming volleys of solid shot or bolts of dark energy wherever its kindred suffered against foes it couldn’t see.

The weapons so preciously crafted by ancient hands and recovered by Arkhan Land did their duty once again, chewing through the embattled Sisters with murderous precision. It raked them with explosive fire or reaved them down with energy beams – one it even managed to destroy by crushing her beneath its foot when it sought to impale the daemon’s stolen metal corpus.

The daemon exhaled blackness, its breath staining the golden mist around its maw. Its tongue slithered free, hanging long and undulating in the fog. It wasn’t capable of pleasure beyond the fulfilment of its nature, but there was satisfaction here. These hollow impressions of human females were far easier to kill when they could be torn apart with mortal weapons that vomited killing energy.

Though it wasn’t born of war, it sensed the ebb and flow of the battle around it. Each of the Anathema’s Daughters’ deaths was a lessening of pressure against the creature’s pained perceptions. Each burst body let the warp’s song grow louder once more. Every one that fell allowed the daemon’s lesser kindred to rise again, to fight harder.