Descent of Angels: Loyalty and Honour

271 Pages·2007·1.14 MB·English

by  Scanlon Mitchel

THE HORUS HERESY
Mitchel Scanlon
DESCENT OF ANGELS
Loyalty and honour
v1.2 (2011.11)
The Horus Heresy
It is a time of legend.
Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the
Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the
myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and
wiped from the face of history. The dawn of a new age of supremacy for
humanity beckons. Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many
victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record
the epic deeds of his most powerful and deadly warriors.
First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superheroic beings who
have led the Emperor’s armies of Space Marines in victory after victory.
They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic
experimentation. The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the
galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or
more in combat. Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called
Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in
the name of the Emperor.
Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest
Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster,
the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a
thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior
without peer, a diplomat supreme, and his ambtion knows no bounds.
The stage has been set.
CONTENTS
DESCENT OF ANGELS
The Horus Heresy
CONTENTS
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
PRELUDE
BOOK ONE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
BOOK TWO
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
BOOK THREE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
BOOK FOUR
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
AFTERMATH
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The Order LION EL’JONSON, Commander of the Order LUTHER, Second in
command of the Order ZAHARIEL, Knight Supplicant of the Order NEMIEL,
Knight Supplicant of the Order MASTER RAMIEL, Training Master of the Order
LORD CYPHER, Guardian of the Order’s traditions BROTHER AMADIS, The Hero
of Maponis, Battle Knight of the Order SAR HADARIEL, Battle Knight of the
Order ATTIAS, Knight Supplicant of the Order ELIATH, Knight Supplicant of
the Order The Knights of Lupus LORD SARTANA, Master of the Knights of
Lupus The Dark Angels BROTHER LIBRARIAN ISRAFAEL, Chief Librarian of the
Dark Angels The White Scars SHANG KHAN, Leader of White Scars
Expeditionary Force Bearers KURGIS, Astartes battle-brother of the 7th
Chapter The Saroshi LORD HIGH EXALTER, Leader of the Saroshi Bureaucracy
DUSAN, Saroshi exegetist Non-Imperials LORD GOVERNOR ELECT HARLAD
FURT, Overseer of the Sarosh territories CAPTAIN STENIUS, Captain of the
Invincible Reason MISTRESS ARGENTA, Fleet Astropath, Invincible Reason
RHIANNA SOREL, Composer and Harmonist
PRELUDE
IT BEGINS ON Caliban.
It begins back before the Emperor came to our planet, before there was even
the first talk of angels. Caliban was different then. We knew nothing of the
Imperium and the Great Crusade. Terra was a myth, no, not even that. Terra
was a myth of a ghost of a memory brought to us by our long-dead forefathers. It
was an ephemeral and half-forgotten thing with no bearing on our lives.
It was the time of Old Night. Warp storms had made it impossible to travel
between the stars and each human world was left to fend for itself. We had
passed more than five thousand years in isolation from the rest of humanity: five
thousand years. Can you imagine how long that is? Time enough for the people
of Caliban to develop our own culture, our own ways, drawing from the patterns
of the past, but separate from what had gone before. Free from the influence of
Terra, our society had developed in a manner more in keeping with the world in
which we lived.
We had our own beliefs and customs, aye, even our own religions.
There’s precious little of it left now, of course. It was all swept away by the
coming of the Emperor. It is amazing to me, but there are children born of
Caliban today who have never even heard of the Watchers or ridden a mighty
warhorse. They have never known what it is to hunt the great beasts. This is the
sorrow of our lives. Over time, the old ways are forgotten. Naturally, those who
came in the Emperor’s wake claimed this was all to the good. We are making a
new world, a better world: a world fit for the future.
We are making a better world.
It is always the way with conquerors. They don’t say they have come to destroy
your traditions. They don’t talk about banishing the wisdoms of your
grandfathers, turning the world upside-down, or replacing your ancient beliefs
with a strange new creed of their devising. No one willingly admits they want to
undermine your society’s foundations and kill its dreams. Instead, they talk
about saving you from your ignorance. I suppose they think it sounds kinder that
way.
But the truth of it remains the same, regardless.
I am getting ahead of myself though, for at this moment in Caliban’s history, all
these things were unknown to us. In time, the Emperor would descend from the
heavens with his angels, and everything would change. The Great Crusade had
not yet reached us. We were innocent of the wider galaxy. Caliban was the sum
total of our experience, and we were content in our ignorance, unaware of the
forces heading towards us and how much they would transform our lives.
In those days, Caliban was a world of forests. Except for a few places given
over to settlement or agriculture, the entire planet was covered in primordial,
shadow haunted woodland. The forest defined our lives. Unless a man made his
home in the mountains or lived near the coast, he could spend his entire life
without once seeing an open horizon.
Our planet was also the domain of monsters.
The forests teemed with predators, not to mention all manner of other hazards.
To use a word we didn’t know then, a word taken from the lexicon of Imperial
Cartography, Caliban is a death world. There isn’t much here that is not
capable of killing a man, one way or another. Carnivorous animals, poisonous
flowers, venomous insects: the creatures of this world only know one law and
that is ‘‘kill’’ or be ‘‘killed’’.
Of all the dangers to human life, there was one class of creatures that was
always viewed as being set apart from the rest. They were more fearsome and
brutal than any other animal we knew.
I am talking about the creatures we called the great beasts.
Each great beast of Caliban was as different from its fellows as a sword is
different from a lance. Each creature represented the only example of its kind, a
species of one. Their diversity was extraordinary. An individual beast might
appear to be modelled after a reptile, or a mammal, or an insect, or else
combine the features of all of them taken together in chaotic collaboration.
One might attack with tooth and claw, another with beak and tentacle, another
using horns and hooves, while yet another might spit corrosive poison or bleed
acid in place of blood. If they had one dominant feature, it was that every one of
them appeared to be crafted directly from the stuff of nightmares. Allied to that,
they each possessed qualities of size, strength, ferocity and cunning that made
them the match of any ordinary human hunter, no matter how well-armed he
might be.
It would not be overstating the case to say that the great beasts ruled the
forests. Many of the customs we developed on Caliban owed their origins to the
beasts’ presence. For humanity to survive we had to be able to hold the beasts at
bay. Accordingly, knightly orders were formed among the nobility to create
warriors of exemplary skill and ability, armed to the highest standards, and
trained to protect human society against the worst predations of these monsters.
They were aided in this by the persistence of certain traditions in the making of
weapons and armour. Most of the technology our distant ancestors brought with
them to Caliban had been forgotten in our isolation, but the knowledge of how to
repair and maintain pistols and explosive bolts, swords with motorised blades,
and armour that boosted a warrior’s strength and power had been preserved.
Granted, they were relatively primitive versions and they lacked the reliability of
the more powerful models later brought to Caliban by the Imperials, but they
were effective all the same. We had no motor vehicles, so the knights of Caliban
rode to war on the backs of destriers – enormous warhorses selectively bred
over thousands of years from the equine bloodstock brought to our world by its
first settlers.
In due course, the knightly orders went on to build the great fortress
monasteries that still serve as many of the major places of settlement in modern
Caliban. Whenever one of the beasts began to prey on a settlement, the leader of
the local nobility would declare a hunting quest against the creature. In
response, knights and knights-supplicant would come to the area from every
land, seeking to prove themselves by killing the beast and completing the quest.
This, then, was the pattern of life on Caliban for countless generations. We
expected it to continue indefinitely. We thought our lives would follow the same
well-trodden path as the lives of our fathers and grandfathers.
We were wrong, of course. The universe had other plans for us.
The Emperor was coming, but the first currents of change in our society were
already at work long before his arrival. Some time before the Emperor came to
Caliban, a new knightly order had been founded among our people. It called
itself simply ‘the Order’, and its members put forward the startling proposition
that all men were created equal.
Previously, it had been traditional for knights to be recruited strictly and solely
from among the nobility, but the Order broke with accepted practice to recruit
from all layers of society. So long as an individual could prove by his deeds and
his character that he was worthy of knighthood, the Order did not care whether
he was a noble or a commoner.
It may seem a minor matter now, but the issue sparked no small amount of
turmoil and controversy at the time. Traditionalist diehards among the more
established orders regarded it as the thin end of a wedge that they thought would
inevitably bring the whole edifice of our culture crashing down, and leave us as
easy prey for the great beasts. In one case, this issue even led to open warfare.
A group calling itself the Knights of the Crimson Chalice attacked the Order’s
mountain fortress at Aldurukh and laid siege to it. In what would later be seen as
one of the defining moments of Caliban’s pre-Imperial history, the knights of the
Order sallied forth and counter-attacked before the enemy had completed their
siege lines.
The resulting battle was decisive. The Knights of the Crimson Chalice were
routed, and the survivors hunted down to the last man. With this victory, the
future progress of the Order was guaranteed. Supplicants flocked to them from
all walks of life and, within the space of barely a few decades, the Order had
become one of the most powerful and well-regarded knightly groups on Caliban.
This was only the beginning, however. Whatever subtle changes were brought
to our society by the rise to prominence of the Order were as nothing compared
to what would happen when the Lion came to Caliban.
With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that Lion El’Jonson is one of the
primarchs, wrought in gene-labs by the Emperor to lead the armies of his
angels, but at the time he was far more extraordinary to us.
We were not an unsophisticated people, nor were we primitives. Imagine the
effect, though, as word spread across our planet that a man had been found
living wild, like an animal, in the deep forests of the Great Northwilds, his
features handsome and beautiful beneath the matted hair and the mud caked to
his body.
No one knew who he was, and he spoke not a word of human language. He had
survived for years, naked and unarmed, in the wilderness of the most dangerous
region on Caliban – a place where even fully armoured knights hesitated to
venture unless as part of a larger group. Nor was it the end of the wonders
associated with this strange figure.
In light of the details of his discovery, the wild man came to be called Lion
El’Jonson, meaning ‘‘The Lion, the Son of the Forest’’ in the old tongue of
Caliban. Having been brought to human society, Jonson soon demonstrated a
prodigious talent for learning.
He quickly assimilated human ways, learning the habit of speech within a
matter of days. From there, his rate of progress increased exponentially. Within
a few short months, he was the equal in mind of our finest savants. A month
later, he had exceeded their greatest achievements and left them trailing in his
wake.
He never spoke of his days in the forest, nor could he account for how he had
come to be living there or where he had come from, but his powers of reason
and intelligence seemed unaffected by his time in the wilderness.
His intellectual capacity was matched only by his physical power. None could
match his strength or prowess in combat, and he swiftly mastered the skills of
knighthood to be accepted into the Order.