Eternal Crusade by Graham McNeill

Author:Graham McNeill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-13T09:19:01+00:00

Eldar

Sarielle was a creator of delicate sculptures, but with the donning of her Banshee war-mask, she was now a howling killer. The urge to fight, to drop in amongst the lumbering orks was almost too great to resist.

But Farseer Kseniya and Jain Zar’s orders were clear.

When the fallen eagle shines as gold. Strike. Kill.

She and her fellow Howling Banshees perched amid the velvet shadows of protruding roof beams in what had once been a human temple structure. A shattered rosette window, all but one of its coloured panes shattered, filled the end wall. A toppled altar to the human’s wizened corpse-god lay shattered opposite the broken window. A buckled effigy of their winged idol lay sprawled across it.

The temple was grandiose by human standards, but little more than a hovel to one raised on the eldar Craftworld of Biel-tan. The soaring wraithbone towers and graceful palaces, wrought into being by the bonesingers were majestic and beautiful in a way human structures could never be.

The walls of the temple were fire blackened, its roof little more than a shadowed ruin of jutting iron spars and twisted girders. A striated sky, like a watercolour left out in the rain, pressed down on the city.

That the temple was still standing at all was a miracle. The orks of Warlord Skarblitz were stripping the abandoned city of every scrap of metal, timber and stone. This was one of the few structures that had yet to feel the fury of their scavenger mobs and demolisher hulks.

Sarielle watched the greenskins with a haughty disdain, the purity and depth of which no race but eldar could attain. They barged and roared and spat like beasts. One squatted to empty its bowels in the corner. Even from high in the rafters, the stench made Sarielle want to gag. None of the orks had seen the eldar Aspect Warriors, even though a few had looked up to assay the structural members that once supported the roof.

The orks wore rough garb fashioned from oil-and-mud-stained rags, over which scraps of hammered sheet metal plates were strapped to their broad, powerful bodies to serve as armour. Many had horned helms pressed onto their brutish, tusked skulls. A few sported mechanical arms or legs that hissed and wheezed, leaking oil and hydraulic fluid.

‘It is a wonder to me that such uncouth, savage beings can function at all, much less traverse the stars,’ whispered Drytha, shaking her head.

Sarielle looked up in surprise.

Exarch Drytha was not given to speaking in the moments before blood was to be shed. Sarielle’s squad leader was a warrior beyond compare, whose skill with her twin mirror swords was sublime.

Sarielle envied Drytha her slayer’s prowess, but in her more introspective moments, feared what the exarch represented. At battle’s end, Sarielle could remove her war-mask and return to her artistry without guilt for the lives she had ended, but Drytha’s life had become wedded to the Path of the Warrior.

The exarch was doomed to be a killer until the end of her days.

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