[Dawn of War 02] - Ascension Read online

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

  DAWN OF WAR:

  ASCENSION

  Dawn of War - 02

  C. S. Goto

  (v1.5)

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred

  centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne

  of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the

  gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his

  inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly

  with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the

  Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are

  sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his

  eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested

  miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their

  way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the

  Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on

  uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the

  Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-

  warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial

  Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant

  Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to

  name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely

  enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens,

  heretics, mutants—and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold

  billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody

  regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times.

  Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has

  been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of

  progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future

  there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars,

  only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the

  laughter of thirsting gods.

  PROLOGUE

  Beginnings swirl into the forgotten past, like ideas fading into the inconstant oceans of memory. They swim, free-floating on the cusp of the empyrean, flickering in and out of reality, as though prodding at the consciousness of a submerged mind. Without warning—or with warnings so subtle that they pass as mere comets’ tails or clouds of burning gas—an old beginning can push itself out of forgetfulness and cast itself into the glare of a new sun, dragging itself out of the oceans of darkness and into the light once again.

  There are but few whose thoughts sense the eddies and dances of moments gone by, and fewer still whose souls sail the very brink of the abyss from which the ghosts of beginnings and ends emerge into our world. And those few are both the best and the worst of us, for there is nothing hidden to them in the great expanse of time. But even the greatest of them is not always free to choose the sea-lanes on which their visions might sail.

  The future is no different from the past. It is nothing more than a beginning yet to come, and it curdles in the endless ocean of time, riddling the depths of the invisible realms with immaterial phantasms. It is the idea of a current and the suggestion of a storm; it is the gathering cloud that persuades a sailor to drop anchor, to head for land, or to brace for the coming of hell. But not every wisp of vapour births a maelstrom, and not every sailor looks up to heaven.

  The future grows from myriad beginnings, but each of those beginnings also have a beginning of their own—an infinity of regressions back to The Beginning, before which an origin was not even a word and the future was an unbounded explosion of light. It was not a moment or an event, but a tear in the very fabric of our universe, through which the empyrean and the material realm could spill and mingle. Before the tear, there was nothing but darkness or perhaps nothing but light, and from it was born reality itself.

  The Old Ones told of a time after The Beginning when an Ancient Enemy emerged from the hearts of a thousand suns, feeding on light, drinking the very life of the galaxy. These glittering beings were born entirely into the material realm, and they were its undisputed lords—commanding the very stars themselves. But mastering the materium and conquering the galaxy were not the same thing, and the Old Ones confronted this Ancient Foe by surfing the tides of the immaterium, drawing ineffable power from realms incomprehensible to the star gods, realms swimming with the unformed and raw powers of daemons and gods.

  I have heard legends that this was the time when daemons first dragged themselves into existence, clawing their way through the rift between realms, salivating at the scent of life on the other side. And I have also heard that eldar more ancient even than Asurmen himself were born into this time, fed by curdling eddies of power where the Old Ones stirred the material and immaterial together with a giant, warp-stone jewelled spear. Thus the Old Ones stood against them at the dawn of war itself. Despite the machinations of the Ancient Enemy, the tear in the galaxy was never sealed, and from it continues to pour the echoes and promises of our eternity. From it seeps hope and damnation together.

  Buried in the deepest vaults of the Black Library, hidden from the eyes of the young races and the foolish hearts of our time, lie the tomes of the most ancient of the eldar, the very first volumes to be taken into the care of the Harlequins, older than the mysterious library itself. There are rumours that these timeless texts may even bear the imprints of the Old Ones themselves. I have seen them, and they are exquisite.

  The Black Library itself lies veiled in the lashes of the webways that riddle the great tear, surfing the empyrean tides as a glorious galleon in the light-streaked darkness. If the Ancient Enemy were to return to complete their Great Work, then the tear would be sown up, the Library would blink out of existence and the sons of Asuryan would be cut off from their life source forever. We would cease to be; cease to ever have been as the universe was severed from its own memories. The Eye of Isha would dim, closing for all eternity. The legacy of the Old Ones would vanish.

  For the Ancient Foe have no souls, and thus nothing to fear by severing reality in two—draining the life force from the substance of life.

  For the Ancient Foe have only life, and an insatiable thirst for death.

  For the Ancient Foe were turned back only by the blinding brilliance of Isha’s gaze, and, were that gaze ever to fade, there would be nothing to stand before them.

  Thus the gaze of Isha is cast over the universe, sprinkling it with moments of light, ever vigilant for the first stirrings of ancient endings.

  And it is to the farseer that we turn for visions of time beyond and around our own; it is they who pilot our craftworlds through the treacherous tides and webs of fate, casting their eternal souls to skim the fringes of the ineffable abyss. They are the navigators of our souls, seeing the past and future blended into our present, seeing ancient origins swimming into our destinies together with the daemons who continue to claw their way into our realm.

  But I have seen the treachery of our ways: even the farseers cannot see everything or everywhen, and if they could it would drive them into madness. Visions of paradise and hell are inseparable: the great tear brings both glory and annihilation—it is the birthplace of war and victory. With the eldar, our daemons were also born into reality, and even I cannot see whether it was wise to pay this price to arrest the advance of the Ancient Foe. Even the present is unclear—visions of elsewhen are doubly treacherous.

  From The Treachery of Vision by

  Eldrad Ulthran, Ulthwe

  CHAPT
ER ONE: VISIONS

  In the glittering darkness of her sanctum, deeply enshrouded in the immensity of the Biel-Tan craftworld, Farseer Macha was sitting in concentration. The stones scattered into the air, spiralling and spinning like tiny planets in a vacuum. Each glinted with a pregnant light, shimmering gently as though pulsing with energy, and casting kaleidoscopic reflections through the shadowy chamber. The fragments of light danced delicately over Macha’s inhumanly elegant features as she gazed intently at the shifting patterns.

  The eldar farseer was kneeling quietly, her long white hair falling in loose cascades over the skin of her exposed shoulders. It rippled slightly, as though caught in a breeze from another realm. She was wrapped in a translucent, emerald-green cloak, fastened by a silver clasp just below her supersternal notch. Its delicate, diaphanous fabric seemed to shift like the air itself, caressing the immaculate pale skin that was concealed beneath it.

  As she watched, the rune-stones swirled in the air before her, etching patterns of light into the darkness, spyring and gyring to and fro like birds of prey circling their quarry. Her glittering green eyes flicked and tracked the movements, but her body remained absolutely motionless.

  The configuration of the stones shifted and swam, as each hovered and flew above the glistening, circular wraithbone tablet that was set into the floor in the centre of the chamber, just a breath away from the farseer’s knees. Their movements defined a rough sphere, as though their paths were bounded by an invisible orb; they swept into curves and arcs, skating the perimeter before being turned back by some mysterious gravity.

  Macha’s eyes narrowed as the flight of the stones accelerated, bringing her concentration into sharper focus to prevent the runes from escaping the curved pocket of space-time in which they raced. A fizzing, whirring whine began to build as the stones rushed against the banal, material resistance of the atmosphere in the chamber, and the scent of heat started to waft into the air. Trails of deep green smoke were left in the wake of the stones, like lines of vapour behind aircraft. After a few seconds, the invisible, floating sphere became a dull cloud of dirty green, shot through by the burning flashes of the runes.

  An instant later and there was peace. The runes fell into stillness, as though they had suddenly run out of energy. The smoke began to dissipate into wisps that snaked up and away from the stones, spreading silent tendrils across the smooth blackness of the low ceiling. For a moment, the rune-stones lay in the air, as though supported on tiny, hidden platforms. But suddenly they fell, dropping straight down and clattering against the polished surface of the wraithbone tablet below, bouncing and skidding until finally coming to rest.

  Without moving her body, Macha lowered her profoundly inhuman eyes to gaze upon the pattern defined by the fallen stones. Each lay in its own reflection on the water-like wraithbone while the intricate and ancient runes etched into their surfaces glowed with understated power. Macha stared at them, letting her long eyelashes touch together, blurring the faint lights into muffled stars. Then her eyes closed completely and her vision exploded into light.

  White. Pure white. Resolving into javelins and streaks of brightness, like torrential rain. Blinding light, like an exploding star, ripping through space. An inferno, rippling like water, gushing and flooding, crashing and cascading over a craft. An eldar cruiser. A wraithship. The Eternal Star was afloat in the surge, with waves of fire smashing against its shimmering hull. It bucked and heaved, fluttering wildly like a great oil-drenched bird, bleeding energy in terrible swirls of blue.

  Despite herself, Macha flinched at the uncontrolled violence pouring through her mind. She pressed her eyelids together more tightly, sending fine creases jousting across the smooth skin of her perfect face.

  Tiny specks of darkness flashed through the wash of brightness, darting and flicking like a school of fish. A flock of birds, twisting and diving through the hail and the driving rain. The miniature black moments seemed to conduct the searing white energy around them, like small magnets dragging the flows into curves and pulling them into new pathways that punched straight into the fleeing shapes of other vessels. The escapees were fleet, but they were no match for the specks of night that zipped along in pursuit. The little white and green ships danced and spiralled with exquisite grace, defining sweeps of beauty in amongst the waves of destruction and ruin, but it seemed that they were reduced to slow motion as the shoals of darkness ripped at them with threads of lightning. The prey were Shadowhunters—eldar escort ships…

  The farseer strained her vision, struggling to contain the carnage that raged in her mind. She could feel the despair flowing out of the images, and it was exciting an anger deep in her soul, which fed the violence of the imagery still further. Even though it clouded the echoes and reflections of time, it was not always possible to keep the personality of a seer out of her visions, especially when the images were so emotive. Eldar emotions could be the ruin of the universe, if only in the minds of their farseers.

  There had to be more detail. She could not tell who the attackers were—she had never seen such vessels before. And she could not tell when the attack was taking place—was it the past or the future that she saw?

  With an abrupt anti-flash of darkness, a swirling vortex whirled up in front of the star, seemingly sucking the light into itself and drawing the life out of the sun. The ghoulish shadow spun and shimmered with an eerie black light, somehow more brilliant than the star that it appeared to consume. For an instant, the spectral shade seemed to resolve itself into the suggestion of an iridescent humanoid figure, eclipsing the sun with its radiance. Then it blurred back into motion and was gone.

  Another image pierced Macha’s thoughts, pressing in from behind her and making her mind’s eye spin to confront it.

  On the fringes of the torrent of light there were other ships. Bulky and ugly, like those of the mon-keigh. Slow and cumbersome, with repulsive angles and crude explosive weapons. They were bobbing in the waves of energy, like ships about to be lost to the sea. Their weapons flared with desperate abandon, shredding the space with torpedoes, shells, and fragments of death. Streaming out of the larger vessels were lines of smaller ships, not much bigger than the Shadowhunters, but much slower. They swam through the quagmire of energy and battle, heading for the Eternal Star.

  “It was Lsathranil’s Shield,” said Macha, meeting the gaze of the exarch with such passionate certainty that he could not doubt her. The light in her chambers flickered imperceptibly, echoing her own intensity.

  “You’re quite sure, farseer?” asked Laeresh, deciding that it might be prudent to doubt her a little; Macha was a passionate female, and she always wore the fierce mask of certainty. “It would not do to be mistaken in this.”

  “Quite sure, Laeresh. The planet is unmistakable, and the light is definitive.”

  The warrior considered her for a moment, studying her exquisite features and searching them for the tiniest flickers of doubt. He was sure that she could not be right all the time. None of the seers could see everything, and none had perfectly crisp vision—there was always room for a slip, or for personal interest to breathe clouds across the vista.

  Laeresh himself had been a seer once, during one of his previous stops along the winding Path of the Eldar, so he knew the racks of doubt that plagued the sensitive mind. He had not withstood them well, and he had marvelled at Macha’s mastery of her thoughts even then, when she was little more than a youthful seer, still searching for her place and role on the craftworld of Biel-Tan.

  Whilst Macha had finally found her calling on the Path of the Seer, plunging her destiny into the wild oceans of her people’s souls, Laeresh had found his certainty in the hilt of a reaper launcher; abandoning the Seer Way he had fixed his soul into the hands of Kaela Mensha Khaine, the Bloody-Handed God. He joined the ranks of the Dark Reapers, one of the most sinister and lethal of all the temples of Aspect Warriors, finally losing himself in the craze and passion of battle—finding his soul reflected in the sli
ck sheen of the blood that pooled around his feet.

  He regretted nothing and could remember little of his life before becoming the temple’s exarch. Such was the price of his ascension. But he could remember Macha: he could remember her face when it was younger and fresher than it was now. If anything, she had grown more beautiful as the pain and terror of her visions had gradually carved themselves into the depths of her emerald eyes. Every time he looked at her, he ached with half-disremembered, half-buried emotions. It made him doubt his own judgment. It made him resent her certainly.

  The Reaper exarch gazed at the farseer for another moment, as though calculating his decision. “If you are so certain,” he said, tilting his head inquiringly, “then we must take this to the Court of the Young King. Biel-Tan must prepare for war.”

  “I never said that it was the future,” replied Macha flatly, as though the question itself had missed the point. To an outsider, she might have seemed to be chiding a slow student. “I could only see where the battle was raging, not when. It may have been the past that I saw.”

  Despite her almost whispered tone, the farseer’s voice echoed repeatedly around the great reception hall; in this elaborate ceremonial chamber, Macha’s ineffable majesty was at its most dramatic. The sound swept round the elevated throne in the centre and reflected back on itself, bouncing up into the vaulted reaches of the ceiling. It was as though there was more to her voice than the audible noise, and the small congregation of eldar arrayed before her shifted uneasily, aware that the farseer lived in a space that was a mystery to them.

  Although Laeresh had requested an audience with the Court of the Young King on behalf of Macha, the traditions of the craftworld dictated that the Court would honour this request by visiting the ritual throne chamber of the farseer herself. Laeresh enjoyed the Court’s discomfort in this glorious space.