The Talon of Horus by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Author:Aaron Dembski-Bowden
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2014-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

ASTRONOMICAN

Any sailor within the void knows of the Astronomican, the so-called Ray of Hope. It is the psychic light by which millions of Navigator mutants from gene-forged bloodlines guide their vessels through the tumultuous warp. Without the Astronomican, there is no Imperium.

Less commonly known is its source. The Imperium at large believes the beacon is born of the Emperor Himself, but He only directs the power. He does not produce it. Beneath the Imperial Palace, where a thousand souls are shackled and sacrificed every day to the grinding machinery of the Emperor’s life-engine, the Astronomican is projected through the Hell behind reality. A psychic scream echoing through the night, giving mankind a light to sail by.

We can see that light. Those of us within the Empire of the Eye can actually see it. The Astronomican reaches even to our purgatorial exile, and to us it is no mere mystical radiance illuminating the warp. It is pain, it is fire, and it plunges entire Neverborn worlds into war.

It would be a mistake to believe the Emperor’s power battles the Four Gods’ forces, here. It is not order against chaos, nor anything as crude as ‘good’ against ‘evil’. It is all psychic energy, crashing together in volatile torment.

Most of the Radiant Worlds are uninhabitable, lost in the lethal crash of conflicting psychic energies. Armies of fire angels and flame-wrought projections wage war against everything in their path. We call this region the Firetide. What made the Avernus Breach so valuable was its path, not its destination. It cut through the systems forever bleached bare of life by the Firetide, and into the calmer Radiant Worlds beyond. These are the star systems bathed in psychic light without burning in it.

Entire centuries will pass without a single vessel sailing the region, for it offers little to us beyond yet another example of soul energies manifesting in ways mortals can barely control. On more than one occasion the Mechanicum has sought to use Neverborn spirits bound within arcane flesh-machinery to record the Radiant Worlds in an ever-shifting, evolving map. Such attempts have fared as poorly as you might imagine.

The creature calling itself Imperious was another facet of the Astronomican’s power. An unconscious surge of psychic might manifest not as light, or flame, or an avenging angel – just a holy man on a pilgrimage of his own. A ghoul risen from the Emperor’s restless dreams. I confess, its gentleness unnerved me. I had expected rage and flame, not this odd echo of humanity.

‘Why have you come?’ the creature asked. ‘Why sail in the winds of the Emperor’s chorus? There is nothing for you here. Your souls feed on conquest and thirst for blood. There is nothing to conquer within these tides. There is nothing that can bleed.’

Across the strategium, the mutants and human crew were still recoiling, cowering, crying out in the wake of the avatar’s words. Tzah’q stood with a pack of several of his bridge enforcers, their antiquated lasrifles aimed at the ghost upon my throne.

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