Echoes Of Eternity by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Author:Aaron Dembski-Bowden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2022-07-28T15:17:42+00:00

Tomorrow, everyone is mortal

Zephon

Don’t look up.

The order passed through the defenders, sometimes spoken, sometimes whispered. An order that was easy to give and impossible to follow. Whatever kaleidoscopic unrest had started in orbit was putting roots down into Terra’s atmosphere. It affected the ash in the air, thinning it, sucking it up, discolouring what remained. It turned the thinned dust into a stinking mist of faint colours that had no names.

As the sky cleared to offer that hazy revelation of mother-of-pearl madness, the stars returned to the night-time heavens. With the return of the sky came a return of the horizon, and a wider view of the wasteland around the final fortress. For many of the defenders, ignorance had been bliss. The dust had occluded so much of the torture that Terra was undergoing, and masked the odds against the men and women that now massed on the last wall. Zephon felt their despondency as a physical thing, a miasma in the air. It weighed him down as he walked the ramparts.

The keep above the Delphic Archway was a nexus of weary industry. Armoury thralls laboured with hand tools, patching battleplate in dire need of replacement instead of mere repair. Servitors distributed crates of ammunition from the cache chambers established by Rogal Dorn in readiness for these last days. Hammers struck in ceaseless arrythmia. Welding torches crackled and sparked. Autoloaders clanked as shells were dragged through the guts and up into the throats of turrets. Ceramite warplate, once a proud cavalcade of reds, whites and yellows, was now medallioned with scars and greyed by smears of armour cement. Injuries were stitched, stapled and sealed behind bandages. Pain was banished by narcotic suppressives. Troops on the battlement checked and rechecked weapons, while above them, the sky undulated in the thrashing dance of a semi-sentient pantheon.

And, in quiet corners where loyal human defenders gathered out of sight of the Astartes, prayers were offered up to an absent God-Emperor.

Tomorrow, every soul capable of wielding a weapon would be on the wall.

Hundreds of Blood Angels, Imperial Fists and White Scars shared the space of what had once been a memorial to heroes of the Unification Wars. Now, it was filled to bursting with warriors undergoing final preparations, each one ringed by slaves and servitors. Every chamber and hall and corridor of the Delphic Keep heaved with similar activity, and it was mirrored all along the battlement itself, under the tortured sky. Most Legion officers were still in the keep, after gathering for Sanguinius to give them their last orders.

It was a strange feeling, to be surrounded by so many souls, yet to feel isolated from all of them. Everyone was at the very edge of exhaustion. Everyone was fighting their own war now. Orders and organisation meant very little. The two armies would lock together and grind each other down until one could no longer hold its ground. There was, the Blood Angel had to admit, a certain comfort in the barbaric simplicity of it all.

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