The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Shields braced, marching in relentless lockstep. Boots like mechanised pistons as they pushed into the passage. Heads down, shields out, they filled its width. Gunfire pummelled them.

Not enough to stop them.

Nowhere near enough to stop them.

2

Alivia traced the patterns she’d memorised all those years ago over the surface of the gate. Each movement sent a rippling shiver of painful disgust through her.

She knew what lay beyond the gate better than most.

She knew how it hungered for what lay on this side.

A closed gate was better than no gate, and the howling, mad, devouring things on the other side weren’t about to give up even this tenuous hold without a fight.

Alivia’s empathic gift was now a curse. This close to the gate, every hateful thought she’d ever had was magnified. She relived the pain of every lover who’d betrayed her, every attacker who’d wounded her and every person she’d abandoned.

And not just hers. Valance and his four men knelt beside her with their rifles shouldered. They were soldiers, and had a lot of bad memories. All of them crowded her thoughts. Tears streamed down her face and wracking sobs spasmed in her chest.

Not for the first time, she cursed in a dead language that she had been left to do this. She knew that he couldn’t do it. After what he had taken from the realm beyond, it would be suicide for him to draw so near to those whose power he’d stolen.

Every mantra she whispered was faltering, every line she drew in lunar caustic was fading before she could empower it. She couldn’t focus. All the years she’d spent waiting in readiness for this moment and she couldn’t bloody concentrate.

Hardly surprising, really.

The sound of battle was incredible. Bolters and other, heavier weapons were filling the passageway with explosive rounds, but she knew it wouldn’t be enough to stop the Warmaster.

She had known that Horus would find this place eventually, but he had found it quicker than she’d hoped. She’d never agreed with the decision to obscure the existence and nature of the warp, but if Alivia’s long life had taught her anything, it was that finger-pointing after the fact was beyond futile.

Four Ultramarines stood with her and her bodyguards, a living shieldwall of flesh and ceramite. This was the only place mortals could survive – being without armour in the midst of a Legion firefight was a sure-fire way to end up dead.

Castor Alcade oathed the warriors protecting her little band to fight as though the Emperor Himself stood behind them.

These men would die for her.

They weren’t the first to do so, but she dearly hoped they’d be the last.

An explosion shook the chamber and she coughed on the acrid propellant fumes. She could taste aerosolised blood misting the air. Not good. Especially with the aggression flaring from every man in the chamber. Ultramarines were all about their practical, but they had sacrificed too much to fight clinically with the cause of their hurt so close.

Alivia breathed deeply, picturing Vivyen and Miska. Even Jeph, with his sad, hangdog eyes and absurd belief that he had to protect her. She missed them, and hoped Molech’s Enlightenment was already accelerating towards the system’s Mandeville point.

No, that wasn’t helping. She needed something more, something cherished. She remembered when the auspex of a trans-loader from Ophir had failed and it ran into a submerged mine in Larsa’s harbour. She hadn’t been on the ship, but had seen it go down with all hands. Only when she returned home did she find out that Vivyen and Miska thought she’d been aboard, and they’d wept for hours believing that she was dead.

She remembered her arms wrapped around them both when they finally succumbed to sleep. Their warm breath and the smell of their hair reminded Alivia of a time long gone, of a life now ended, when she’d been blissfully ignorant of her true nature and the doom approaching Arcadia.

She had been happy then, and she used that to push down the violent thoughts intruding on her psyche. Alivia pictured the symbols she’d been shown: precise arrangements of intersecting lines that couldn’t possibly intersect; curves that broke every established rule of calculus; the geometry of the insane.

She spoke the words that weren’t words, pouring every inch of her desire to see this gate sealed into what she was doing. Her hands described the motions she pictured, moving across the surface of the smooth black barrier.

It looked and felt like a solid barrier, but it wasn’t.

It was a scab over a hole that should never have been torn open, an impossible object that existed in an infinite number of possible existences. It was neither real nor unreal.

A doorway to hell Alivia now attempted to unmake.

Her surroundings faded to grey, a monochrome facsimile of the world where she was the only splash of colour. She heard gunfire, screams of pain and explosions. All were muted and dulled, as though coming from a distant battlefield.