Black Legion by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Author:Aaron Dembski-Bowden [Dembski-Bowden, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: BA
Published: 2017-06-20T05:23:33+00:00

A Garden of Bones

There were no worlds nearby to use as neutral ground. At least, none that we could reach from where we were becalmed in the heart of the storm. It was Nefertari who gifted us with an idea. She came to us, with Ashur-Kai at her side. They approached the rest of the Ezekarion as we stood around the stellar-cartography hololith presenting its unreliable imagery of the flux of nearby Eyespace.

Ashur-Kai spoke first, his voice softer since he had sustained the host of psychic stigmata wounds that had healed scabbily across his features. From his discomfited movements and the ripples of pain radiating from his thoughts, he was wounded within his armour, not just on his face. Injuries of psy-stigmata and war affliction are wounds to the soul as much as to the mind and body. They are notoriously agonising, enough to drive unaugmented humans far beyond reason. Worse still, I suspected that the lacerations to his flesh were mirrored on his muscles and internal organs. He was fortunate to still be alive.

‘The alien,’ he said with his typical distant politeness, ‘has an idea.’

‘Taial’shara,’ she said. And she gestured at the hololith, to a patch of shifting Eyespace devoid of planet or moon or sun.

‘Tulshery?’ Lheor grunted. He had never deemed it necessary to learn any of the eldar tongues. ‘There’s nothing there.’

‘Taial’shara,’ Telemachon corrected him, murmuring with no small reverence.

Nefertari closed her eyes for a moment – an eldar gesture of agreement and trust – at Telemachon’s perfect pronunciation. ‘It was slain in the exodus begun with the birth of She Who Thirsts,’ the eldar continued. ‘You need somewhere to meet your foes? There lies Craftworld Taial’shara, its bones cold in the tainted night. Use its grave for your neutral ground.’

Abaddon spoke through a fanged smile. The idea seemed to appeal to him. ‘Can we reach it, Ashur-Kai?’

‘I believe so, lord.’

And so it was decided.

Abaddon was true to his word, taking only three warriors. Arguably the three most calculated to challenge Daravek’s temper.

We arrived first, at Abaddon’s choice. Around us rose the shattered arches and broken domes of wraithbone architecture, absent of the usual psychic thrumming that teased the senses in the presence of the alien material. As Nefertari had promised, Taial’shara was dead. Even daemons left it alone. Every shred of nourishment had been sucked clean from its husk, down to the plaintive whispers of its ghosts. All was cold. All was silent.

Have you ever walked through the deep-void palaces and spires of an eldar craftworld? They defy easy imagining. Each craftworld is an artificial city, born through alien ingenuity and pushed out to sail the dark heavens like a life raft. They are constructed of psychically resonant wraithbone and shielded against the touch of space. Domes are given over to habitation, others to inhuman hydroponics and agricultural cultivation, others to the eldar’s many temples of war.

Every craftworld is home to a different eldar culture, each realm its own unique jewel in the night. Taial’shara, like so many others, did not escape the death of the species in time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.