Ahriman: The Omnibus by John French

Author:John French [French, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Games Workshop
Published: 2017-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

Part Two

All The Sons

of Ashes

VII

Loyalty

The jungle of his dreams closed over Ahriman. The leaves stirred around him as he slid between them. He paused, cocking his head to listen. The creak of insects and the murmur of the wind in the canopy answered him. Heat pressed close to his skin. Sweat beaded across his body and dribbled down his muscles.

The fatigue of the real following me into the unreal, he thought, as he took a heavy breath. The efforts of the battle on Vohal still clung to his mind and body like a fever. Out in reality, he sat in the Sycorax’s High Citadel as it cut through the warp. The ship and the rest of his fleet had broken off their attack and run back into the warp as soon as the Circle and the Rubricae had materialised on the Sycorax again. The diversion the void assault had provided had cost them a handful of vessels. There had been other costs, though. Here, in the landscape of his dreams, he had no doubt that the oppressive heat of the jungle was his mind’s way of expressing his weariness.

The jungle had once covered Sarlina, a world which had been conquered by the Thousand Sons in a different age. The shadows were different, though; something within his psyche had touched them, and made them grow until they seemed to flow around him like black oil.

He began to move forwards again, feeling the mud ooze around his feet. A flat-bodied insect emerged from beneath a leaf, its carapace a luminescent blue, its fringe of waving antennae tapping at the heat-thickened air. Ahriman watched it move across the leaf.

‘Are you here to find me?’

The voice came from just in front of him. Ahriman leapt back, muscles whipcord tense, eyes scanning the darkness in front of him. A pool of shadow split to reveal a one-eyed face beneath a ragged hood. The lone eye glowed red within the cowl.

‘You are looking for me, aren’t you, my son?’ The figure’s voice rattled dry from cracked lips.

Ahriman straightened. The figure shuffled forwards to where the luminescent insect still sat on a leaf.

‘You were the best of my sons,’ said the figure.

‘The memory of Magnus’s last words to me,’ said Ahriman, and turned away.

‘Quite right. I am not here. I am just an idea, a cyst in your memories formed around the idea of your gene father. You are tired. Your mind is allowing things to manifest that it would normally not. This is a form of conversation with yourself. I am not here. I am a dream. Why break with the simplest explanation? Unless…’ Ahriman turned. The twisted figure was smiling at him, and the flat insect had crawled to sit on the palm of the figure’s hand. ‘Unless it is wrong.’

‘Why would you be here?’

The figure looked back at the insect, raised a long finger and brushed one of the waving antennae.

‘Because you are looking for me. You are looking for me in the past, wondering if there were more secrets that I kept from you even before Prospero burned.

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