Awakenings (Warhammer 40,000) by George Mann

Author:George Mann [Mann, George]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2022-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

‘The unquiet mind of the psyker is a landscape filled with sorrow, madness and waking dreams. It is a dangerous world in which reality and unreality clash in a constant duel for supremacy, in which the whims and passions of the dreamer might be made manifest through sheer will alone. It is a world inhabited by the echoes of the living and dead, and by the gravest sins of the universe given form. In short, it is an abomination, and it must be destroyed.’

– Horace de Clareth, On the Annihilation of the Mutant

Shimmering birds – golden eagles – circling around the spire of a vast cathedral. Three of them, gliding on outstretched wings, feathers ruffled by the fierce crosswinds. They open their beaks, but their squawking is stolen by that same current, whisked away across the rooftops of the surrounding buildings.

Lower they soar, lower, still circling that immense tower, where the banner of the Ecclesiarchy hangs proud, barely stirring in the breeze.

This is a peaceful scene. Serene.

But then, one by one, the eagles burst into flames.

The act is sudden, appalling, grotesque. The birds scream, flapping wildly, but the fire has already ignited their feathers, climbing up their wings, the vivid plumes of their chests, searing their eyes, driving them to frenzy.

From the sky they fall, like tiny bombs dropped upon a dying world, shining heralds of destruction against the frigid, unyielding night.

One burns up as it tries hopelessly to climb higher, a dead husk, trailing naught but ash as it plummets towards the streets far below. No one will ever know its awful fate, for there will be nothing left of it by the time it hits the ground.

Another collides with the spire of the cathedral – so familiar now. This place is known to her. The bird, already dead, smashes into the rippling Ecclesiarchy banner, igniting the flag, so that plumes of smoke billow off on the wind, and the whole of the spire seems to be on fire, just for a moment, as the cloth is hastily consumed, leaving nothing but a black, sooty stain where it had once been, so proud and true.

The final bird, hardier than its brethren, skirls across the sky like a beacon, trailing gleaming light.

She watches it describe frantic circles, the last, fading glimmer of its will to live, and then, still burning, it drops like a stone: down, down towards the city; down, down towards that burgeoning nest of washed-up humanity; down, down until it collides with the rattling tin roof of a crumbling hab-unit, a mile from the cathedral, on the teetering edge of the trench, until, at last, it is still.

It fizzles in sudden, driving rain, steam curling from its ashen husk.

Inside the hab-unit, a man screams. A man with blood for eyes. A man covered in scrawled tattoos that seem to writhe across his pallid flesh like living things. He claws at his temples with the nubs of bloodied, broken fingers. And then, weeping tears of bright blood, he turns and begins scratching again on the wall.

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