The Reflection Crack'd by Graham McNeill

Author:Graham McNeill
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2012-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

The Gallery of Swords was a place where the exhibitionists of the Emperor’s Children liked to display their latest flesh masterpieces. Devotees of Apothecary Fabius, hoping to attract his notice, would drape their latest confections of macabre living art from the bull-headed statues that lined the grand processional of the Andronicus.

The towering granite-hewn heroes of the Legion, warriors who had cut the first histories of the Emperor’s Children into the meat of the galaxy, were no longer recognisable as human. Their lovingly-carved faces had been recut, defaced and shaped anew into forms pleasing to the lurid aesthetics of the Legion. Leering grotesques kept watch on those who passed beneath them, and all who gazed upon them felt the wondrous horror of their debauched expressions.

Apothecary Fabius made his lair beneath the Gallery of Swords, a sprawling medicae complex that had been transformed from a place of healing, research and excellence into a shadowed labyrinth of excruciation, screams and nightmarish, inhumane experiments.

Fulgrim swept into the Gallery of Swords with Julius Kaesoron at his side, majestic in a long robe of cream fabric, with silver embroidered stitching running along the hems and collar. A sword belt of mirrored discs encircled his waist, the golden hilt of the anathame never far from Fulgrim’s hand.

The primarch’s white hair was pulled back into a long scalp-lock woven with mother of pearl and held in place by a circlet of golden laurels. His sculpted chest was bare, and the pale skin bore numerous ridges of scar tissue from the last treatments and enhancements worked upon him by Fabius.

Even though Kaesoron was encased in his spiked and flesh-wrapped Terminator armour, Fulgrim still stood head and shoulders above him. Clad in naught but his finery, Fulgrim was still a warrior to be feared.

The primarch stopped beside one statue that had suffered particularly at the hands of the Legion’s craftsmen. He smiled up at the graven image of a reptilian bull’s head. The warrior’s armour had been cut with blessed symbols, and a trio of hollowed out bodies hung from barbed nooses, one from each outstretched arm, and another from its neck.

‘Ah, Illios, you would not know yourself now,’ said Fulgrim, with wistful nostalgia. ‘I remember the day you first drew sword alongside me as we forged the alliance of the eighteen tribes. We were young then, and warriors who knew nothing of the wider world.’

‘Do you wish he were here with us now?’ asked Kaesoron.

Fulgrim laughed and shook his head. ‘No, for I fear I would have to kill him. He was always so unbending, Julius. He was a man with an unbreakable code of honour from the elder days, I do not think he would have appreciated the enlightenments we have received.’

The primarch took a wistful look at the statue of his former blade brother and a strange expression passed over his alabaster features. Kaesoron’s eyes were no longer able to perceive the world as they once had, but even he could see the light of dark memory in the primarch’s eyes.

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