Evrys’ head swirled as he came to, stirring lethargically as he came out of his healing sleep. The world was a blur, with his artificial eye fshing on and off, each momentary connection resulting in a blinding fsh. Grunting, he tried to reach for the eye, to shut it off, but found his hand missing. With his good hand, he growled, pawing at his malfunctioning orbit until he found the switch, powering it down.
With a sigh of relief, he id back, resting his head on his armor's power pack. His head was throbbing, the pounding in his temples a savage drum beat of his twin hearts’ determination to keep him alive. He could feel sensation and reality swirl around him, the ebb and flow of the arid breeze howling past serving only to distort his sense of self, his sense of time slipping through his fingers as he drifted back into his healing sleep.
For the first time in centuries, he dreamed. Evrys thought about his homeworld, and the Omnissiah's avenging angels raining down on plumes of fme, their intricately detailed crimson armor at odds with the polluted world's drab ndscape. He could see the thin red line of the angels, the muffled rolling thunder of their guns, and the charnel house of death that fell in their wake. Oddly, he couldn't recall his mother's face as she led him to the angels, his little hand in hers as she offered her son in thanks for their sacrifice. Strangely, he definitely remembered her weeping as he was led away, his little hand engulfed in the armored gauntlet of the Sanguinary Priest, the stark-white armor dazzling Evrys as the mouth of the massive metal bird closed, and Evrys was borne aloft, from the only world he had ever known.
He remembered other things, too.
The roaring of a chainsword in his mailed fist as it chewed through a T'au warrior's pte, and the gout of blue vitae that showered Evrys as it died, the stunning beauty of a Trophy World torn asunder by a Tyranid invasion, the waft of holy incense as he monitored servitors refitting a field artillery piece; all these and more swept past in a blur of blunt emotion and sensation that served only to make him spiral further and further down, the quiet moments repced with pain, suffering, and butchery.
The burning of the fortress-monastery, where corrupted serfs prostrated themselves as fmer squads swept burning holy promethium amidst them, their perverse moans lost in the crackle of corrupted flesh and bone burning to ash. Evrys himself had a fmer mounted to his servo-arm, and looked on in horror as the warped humans revealed the full extent of their corruption by throwing off their robes, their flesh twisted by magicks far worse than anyone had realized.
“Purification detail, at arms!” Justinian was gesturing with his power sword, directing the Astartes with fmers forward. Evrys swept his gaze hastily across the line, the seething mass of Astartes in lockstep as they swept burning promethium through the serfs, their flesh crumbling to ashes around twisted bones. The stench stung at Evrys’ eyes, but the rage he felt gnawed at the back of his mind.
The rage. Even here, cradled in null-sleep it threatened to overtake him. He felt the loss all over again, of the betrayal, the penitence, every moment of agony in that century of endless war.
Nero. The name stoked the fires of his rage even hotter. The Arch-Traitor, the reason Evrys was lying in a burned-out tank hull in the first pce, the reason his Chapter was on the brink of death after their Penitent Crusade. The reason his Chapter fell so far down into the depths of despair, that even death in the Omnissiah's name seemed a preferable alternative to continuing to fight against the inevitable.
Evrys woke slowly. First, he felt pain, the ache of his missing arm dulling by the second. The pain in his belly was greater, sharper, but tolerable. The fractures in his ribcage were half-healed, as was the fracture in his skull. Licking his lips and gasping, he opened his good eye to sweep his gaze around the dead tank's interior. He blinked the rheum from his eye, taking in the dim, wrecked space. Dried blood was spshed everywhere, with bits of meat and bone from the serf pilots’ demise turning the tank into a charnel pit.
The stench flooded his senses, making his mouth water. Evrys grabbed hold of a handrail to his right, straining as he pulled. The handrail screeched, shifting in his grasp, but then settled against the interior. The pain in his belly fred white-hot as he pulled, gritting his teeth against the pain. He pulled himself harder, his armor's servos whining as he moved. The servo-arm mounted to his backpack spasmed as it opened, reaching out to grasp at a spar of twisted steel, slowly dragging him fully to his feet in the off-kilter interior. Evrys coughed, a mist of blood flying from his lips as he retched. One of his ribs had punctured a lung, he guessed.
Above him was a gaping hole in the side of the tank. He could see foul clouds above, the stars hidden from view but the passage of toxic fumes and atomized metal. The contamination permeated the air beyond, threatening to drown out the smell of dried vitae within the hull. His servo-arm reached up, grabbing onto the edge of the breach, the teeth digging into the steel of the tank's hull with a screech. His good hand grabbed the other side of the breach, and he hoisted himself up and out with a pained grunt. “The flesh is weak,” he muttered, straining against his wounds.
He extricated himself from the tank, his feet unsteady as he stood upright in the haze. Evrys’ breath was stolen again, not by pain, but by the sight of the killing fields around him, where traitors and loyalists were id low in droves all around him. The bodies, by the Omnissiah.
Thousands of bodies stretched from horizon to horizon, fmes guttering low in puddles of oil and promethium, sucking greedily at any charcoalized cloth and wood left. Tattered banners stood here and there, the epithets woven into them lost in the heat of-
“Orbital nce strikes?” Dread filled Evrys’ heart. The signs were there: craters of gss, with everything on the periphery of the impact bckened beyond recognition, everything biological fshed into carbon. Further away, ammo had cooked off in magazines, blowing apart humans and Astartes alike with the fury of the strike's passage. And on the edges, Astartes with fissures in their armor y killed, their bodies cooked in their armor with steam escaping by any path avaible, the ceramite shell weakened with the heat.
Evrys stood alone amongst the dead, shocked at the level of destruction around him. Nothing save fme and smoke was left alive, left to consume and be lost in the haze above.
Evrys slid down the side of the wrecked tank, gasping as the pain in his belly as he nded poorly. He reeled, throwing out his good arm to steady himself against a low rock, one side bckened with the passage of the bombardment's fury. He gazed up at the tank, spying the detonated heavy bolter that had left him his exit, then swept his gaze low at the bodies around him. One caught his gaze, and he staggered over to the body, kneeling heavily into the burned dust.
Sergeant Joris, Third Company. Evrys recognized the MkVI helmet, the thin filigree around the left eye socket, and the artificial eye that was an exact match for his own. Gently reaching down, Evrys untched the helmet, pulling it from the dead Space Marine's head. The flesh was bright pink, the biological eye long ruptured from the Sergeant's demise. His face was a rictus grin, face destroyed in the violence of the orbital barrage.
Silently, Evrys disconnected his own electric eye, removing it from his skull. A mechadendrite snaked out, its chrome surface tarnished, and connected to the Sergeant's own. It came alight, functional but still damaged; he could tell the main lens was warped with the heat.
“Forgive me, Brother,” Evrys whispered, disconnecting Joris' eye from his skull. He whispered to the eye, soothing its machine-spirit, and pcating it enough to slot it into his own skull. Evrys was struck with a memory, of the Sergeant badly wounded after a fight with the Orks, where Evrys had installed the eye into Joris’ unconscious head. The eye came to life, slightly damaged, but still usable.
Evrys grabbed the helmet, shaking out the majority of Joris’ steamed flesh. He donned it with difficulty, fumbling at the tch at his neck until the helmet sealed with a familiar hiss. As it connected to his armor's systems, Evrys whispered to his armor.
“Blessed Machine, now in this hour of need, I beseech thee; in this hour of war, I call upon thee; in this moment of service, I trust in thee. Blessed of the Omnissiah, yield unto me so I may bring our enemies to ruin.” The helmet obeyed, interfacing with his armor, sensors coming alight. Sergeant Joris had a priority comlink, one directly to Chapter Master Justinian, and the integrated vox accepted Evrys without resistance.
The vox-channels blinked online, and Evrys held his breath, anticipating the familiar hiss of static, the bark of orders, or even the desperate, broken calls of the dying. Instead, there was nothing.
A void.
No interference, no static crackle, just an unending, suffocating silence. For a moment, he thought his new connection had failed, that Sergeant Joris' helmet had been damaged beyond repair. But no—everything was functioning, responding, and still there was nothing.
It was as if the world had been muted, the echoes of the battle that had raged around him now sealed in a tomb of silence. Anxiety gnawed at his gut, tightening around his wounds, threatening to crush his remaining breath. Evrys forced himself to switch channels, cycling through priority links, the tactical net, the command frequency—anything. Each attempt was met with the same haunting stillness, and each failure was like a blow to his chest.
He clenched his jaw, forcing down a growl of frustration, trying to recall the st time he had heard nothing on the vox. Not during his darkest battles, not even in the darkest depths of the Penitent Crusade, had there been this utter, devastating silence. He had always known that somewhere, his brothers fought on, that somewhere there was a voice he could reach out to. But now, standing alone in a field of corpses, he felt the crushing finality of the silence—an unspoken confirmation of his worst fears.
He swept his gaze around, the helmet's auspex picking out details of the ndscape. Screaming mouths frozen in agonizing death were fshed to carbon, exposed flesh blistered and ruptured, and cabling on armor stripped of insution. Evrys turned his gaze away, regarding Sergeant Joris’ silent form.
An intact bolt pistol was in his armored grip, the red cquer of its casing cracked and burnt. Evrys stooped, pulling the pistol from the dead man's grip. Rigor mortis had set in, making the task difficult with Joris’ armor still active. With a grunt, Evrys wrenched the gun away, stumbling as the pistol came free with a screech of steel.
It was a battered thing, but the machine-spirit endured. Evrys felt the pistol coo to him, its presence a whisper deep within the circuitry of his brain. He stroked the weapon gently, murmuring a few calming words as if to reassure it. Bracing the bolt handle against a rock, he nudged it open just enough to catch a glimpse of brass glinting in the chamber—a small blessing amid the devastation. Satisfied, he slid the pistol into the scuffed Ork-hide holster on his hip, snapping the csp shut with a practiced motion.
His twin hearts quickened as his gaze swept the horizon, searching for any flicker of movement, any sign of life that might break the monotony of death. Then, a wavering rune blinked on the auspex—a command beacon stuttering to life in the distance. The sudden kxon hoot startled Evrys, drawing his attention to its source, roughly three kilometers away.
Command, priority one.
Justinian.
The name hit him like a hammer blow, and without hesitation, Evrys pushed himself forward, clutching his aching gut as he staggered in the direction of the Chapter Master’s beacon. It flickered in and out, a dying pulse in the fog of war, but it was enough to guide him. Each step sent a nce of pain through his abdomen, forcing him into a halting, uneven gait. Yet he trudged on, grinding warped ceramite and ruined flesh to paste beneath his greaves, his mind a solid wall of determination.
Evrys marched, swaying as the pain threatened to overtake him. His breath was ragged in his chest, not only from the pain; but seeing countless battle-brothers sin and forgotten in the dust. Goric, a man with colorful humor. Juni, the stoic. Pollux and Cassiel; these and more he knew from armor alone, and every one he saw was another knife in his heart.
True, Evrys had seen countless of his brothers die, the name of Sanguinius on their lips as death took them, but this? To die forgotten on this backwater world without a name, it sickened him. Human soldiers, some with sguns and others with stub-guns grasped in their burned hands littered the ndscape in between dead traitors and loyal sons alike. The eight-point star of Chaos was hastily marked in dried blood on armor, on weapons, sometimes in hammered brass on the pauldrons of traitorous Astartes; but Evrys paid little attention as he kept up his march. The dead were of little concern to him.
As he picked his way across the battlefield, he began to piece together where he walked. Evrys was walking down the main line of the battle, where the Sons of Sorrow had met the traitors with bdes fshing and fangs bared. And, judging by the wounds on some of his dead brothers, it was a fight that they had been losing.
But why would the traitors strike where they were winning? It made no sense to him, and he slowed to a stop to regard one fallen Astartes, surrounded on all sides by dead traitors. Sword-gouges split his armor nearly everywhere: the breastpte, thighs, calves. There was even a human's sgun bayonet embedded in a pauldron, jutting out squarely from the curved pte.
Cold realization crept in as he regarded Daros’ lifeless body: the traitors had not struck the battlefield with orbital fire.
The Inquisition. The bastard whoresons of the Ordo Hereticus, who ordered them to take to this fight, to finish what was started on the homeworld, who had done this exact strike on the fortress-monastery when the battle seemed all but lost. Now, they had succeeded in wiping out the Sons of Sorrow, with a single strike from the ships that had ferried the loyal sons of Sanguinius to this hellhole.
He fell to his knees, despair filling his chest with its icy finality. The Chapter fleet was assuredly destroyed in orbit. The venerable Battle-Barge Antillus Mordiae that had served since the Great Crusade with the XI Legiones Astartes was no doubt little more than rubble in orbit. The Inquisition had to have known she was in desperate need of refit and repair, that the campaigns of the st century had taken their toll. And the Inquisition's own ships, one a battle-barge in its own right, was quite fresh from Mars…
Evrys cradled his head in his hand. The Thirst was howling in his chest, vying against the despair in his hearts. He wanted to rage, destroy, to rend flesh from bone and see the Ordos bastards die by his hand. But it was futile. Ash swirled around him in the muted breeze, circling around him as he kneeled, teeth gritted in his fury. The twin thuds of his hearts hammered against his healing ribcage like a machine-gun, and a wordless fury erupted from a deep, primal pce within. Each beat was a starter-pistol to him, each urging him to unspeakable violence.
His shout rang across the fields of the dead, the echoes the only sign of life he had encountered so far. Daros still y on his side, his back to Evrys and his fury. Evrys pounded his mailed fist into the actinic soil, grinding his knuckles into the lifeless dust, scraping bare the paint from his gauntlet. Over and over his hammer-blows thudded uselessly into the dirt, a cloud of dust forming as he spent his fury into the soil.
Each blow was thunder, sending shocks up his arm, rattling his already aching bones. He craved the pain, and relished the pain in his gut, each only serving to fuel the fire raging in his chest. The cloud of dust began to settle into his armor, a veil of death that clung to him in its deepest crevices. A final blow into the dirt, and Evrys’ fury was spent. He fell back, panting as his hearts tried to leap from his throat. His vision blurred, and for a moment, his one natural eye could see only darkness. For a heartbeat, he was as blind as the corpses around him, suffocating in the stillness.
A groan off to Evrys’ left dragged him from his reverie, his helmet snapping to the source with a grinding of tortured seals. Nothing moved in the hollow breeze, even as orange dust swirled past, settling around the dead in drifts. Evrys dragged himself upright with a grunt, pawing at his helmet to activate the preysight, rendering the world in stark bck-and-white.
Sweeping his gaze across the wastes, he was startled to find a heat source radiating from beneath a drift of rubble.
“Impossible,” he muttered, but his steps carried him forward anyway. His halting stagger carried him forward, unheeding to his surroundings as he stumbled over a dead Loyalist, spilling him to the ground.
Wincing, he pulled himself up, using a banner-pole embedded into the dirt to drag himself upwards, teeth locked tight as the pain in his belly fred again. His eye watered, but was locked to the heat signature some ten yards distant, and watched in shock as the rubble shifted. Someone else? But earlier…
Evrys shouldered aside the thought. His full attention, every thought ser-focused on his brother in need. He staggered away from the pole, the ancient banner hanging from its tarnished arms crashing to the ground, unheeded by the wounded Space Marine. Dragging his feet forward, he steadily closed the distance, weaving through the bodies. Prone Traitors and Loyalists blocked his way, even a killed Obliterator blocked his path; all were ignored in a dogged pursuit.
Who could it be? Maybe Veteran-Sergeant Gallus, he was a tough bastard for sure, but even he thought every Astartes had his hour of death known by their gene-father and the Emperor above. Not Justinian either, he thought glumly, falling to rest kneeling before the drift of rock and clods of dirt with a plume of oxide dust sent flying.
His gauntlet, master-crafted as it was, tore through the dirt, shredding the dirt as more dust erupted from the ruined soil. His breath was a ragged, panicked thing as scorched earth crumbled before his armored hand, and it yielded satisfactorily as rage crept further back into his chest. Here, he had a goal, an objective to achieve, and it drove him to a frenzy as he crushed stones to gravel in his iron grip.
He breathed a sigh of relief as he felt his fingers hit ceramite. He brushed away more of the dirt, revealing a crimson gauntlet. Evrys stopped, eyes locked on the curled fingers still half-buried in the dust, almost holding his breath as-
The fingers twitched, urging Evrys into motion. He gouged out more dirt, frantically cwing at the soil with wild abandon. The gauntlet was revealed to the wrist, and twitched more as Evrys grabbed at it, locking his grip around the armored wrist of the buried Astartes. He pulled, using his leg servos to give it his all. His armor strained, creaking with the force as the ground resisted him.
With an almighty pull, the buried Astartes came free in a shower of gravel, sending Evrys tumbling back, letting go of the Space Marine’s hand. The world was a blur of gray skies and rust-red earth, and Evrys nded ft on his back, gazing upwards at the ironcd sky through stars swimming through his vision. Head swimming, he was on his feet in a fsh, and recoiled as he beheld the prone, growling form.
“Hail, brother," growled the Traitor, his tusked helm’s maw a cruel grin of snaggletoothed barbs. His lower body was a ruin of fetid intestines, his body ending abruptly above the hips, the stained bone of his spine jutting out of the mess of the Astartes' lower half.
“Traitor." The word was a curse from Evrys’ lips, spat with as much disgust as he could muster. His hand was on the butt of his pistol, fp already undone.
“Hold, brother.” The half-dead Astartes' weakly raised his hand, a plea evident in the wavering gesture.
Something within Evrys’ hearts stopped him from ripping the pistol from his holster and shooting the Traitor dead, against the screaming in the back of his mind, against the protestations of the machine-spirit of the pistol chattering angrily on his hip, begging to sy the wounded Traitor.
The wounded Traitor pointed at him weakly, his arm swaying in the breeze. “I know you."
"Most certainly. I doubt Nero had the resources to produce his own Space Marines, hence the horde.” Evrys' gestured with his stump at the legion of cooling unenhanced human bodies strewn all about them.
"Pah! Nero, that bastard whoreson of the Warp.” The Traitor coughed, his chest heaving. "A thousand curses upon him, we were like blind sheep to the sughter!"
“You curse your liege? I knew you Chaos dogs were fickle, but even unto your dying breath?” Evrys mocked.
"Aye, I curse him. But, you and I served together in the Scout Company, Evrys." The Traitor coughed again, the force raking his ruined body. “It's me, Zarthiel."
“Zarthiel died the moment he followed Nero into damnation," Evrys replied coldly. "All of you did.”
“There's some truth in that, brother,” Zarthiel flopped his arm into the dust, sending a plume airborne. “I heard what the Ordos whelps did to you after our little insurrection.”
“A century of constant war, our numbers depleted to less than a hundred. Chapter relics lost, countless progenitor gnds lost, all to end like this.” Evrys swept his arm around the killing field again. “Was it worth it?”
“In truth, no, brother.” The helmet turned to lock eye-lenses with Evrys’, sending a chill down his spine.
“I've felt hollow ever since the homeworld was scoured, Evrys. All of us, save Nero, immediately knew what we had done was wrong. But the bastard had our minds and hearts chained, and by then it was too te.” Zarthiel cwed at the dirt, his fingers gouging tracks as he raged.
“What else could we do but follow, then? We could have surrendered to the Imperium, but we would have been executed like dogs for our mistake. No,” Zarthiel muttered. “Better to die a warrior’s death than like that of a dog.”
Evrys looked around himself, then back at Zarthiel cwing impotently into the dirt. “And in the process, you damned us all.” His words were ft, no accusations coloring his tone.
Zarthiel ughed a choked, gasping ugh. “We were already damned, Evrys. Every one of us. From the moment we were inducted, we were all doomed to die screaming in a far-flung hellhole on the ass end of nowhere.” Zarthiel’s ugh devolved into another cough, from deep within his chest. Evrys heard tissue tear as Zarthiel retched, and felt, for the first time in decades, pity.
“Brassos is long dead, Zarthiel.” Evrys offered the news ftly, without emotion.
“He was the best of our Scouts. How?”
“Like a warrior, on Crusade against the greenskins. He was a Veteran Sergeant then, the Century of Penitence had just begun.” Evrys stooped beside Zarthiel, regarding the dying Astartes.
“Damn their eyes!” The force of Zarthiel's fury struck a chord in Evrys, and in a moment, everything bled away.
Evrys was surprised by the hand gripping his good arm with a force that could crush steel, an uncanny burst of energy. He locked eyes with Zarthiel again, and in that moment, Evrys understood.
“Better the Emperor’s Peace, than to die slowly in the dirt, eh?” Zarthiel broke their gaze, peering up into the ste sky, lost in memory. “I hope our Father will forgive me.”
“I hope you're worthy.” Evrys stood, drawing the pistol in a fluid motion, aiming and firing in a second. The shot rang out across the battlefield, a death knell that seemed to be almost perverse in the tranquility. The round nded perfectly, pulverizing the breast-pte of Zarthiel's armor, mulching his hearts in an instant. Death was immediate, and the hand fell to his side, twitching once more before lying still.
