Vulkan: Lord of Drakes by David Annandale

Author:David Annandale
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2018-09-04T09:05:40+00:00

Six

severed artery / warlord / the furnace

Despair has never been in the blood of the Legion. There was a time, however, when hope seemed as alien. Hope is ours, and it must be as tempered and tested as every other facet of our identity. It is our right through forging. We are formed upon the anvil, through fire and ­hammer. The creation is painful, and the pain is necessary. What emerges is stronger and wiser for the tempering, and by its own existence justifies the reality of hope.

– Vulkan, Lessons of the Anvil

The explosion hurled Numeon up, through ork bodies, towards the cavern wall. For a few seconds his auto-senses were as disrupted as his own thoughts were from the concussion.

‘Squad, call out,’ he shouted, as much to clear his head as to know who was alive. He rose to his feet, still blind, as the other four responded.

‘Form on my position,’ he called. He almost fell again. He couldn’t seem to find his feet. Then his vision cleared. The roar was not in his ears, and the unsteadiness was not his own. The explosion seemed to be unending. There were deep, reverberating cracks, and the grind of rock against rock. Beneath his feet, the dome was rising and falling.

‘I rejoice that I am still alive,’ Caelius said dryly.

‘They did not mean to, but the orks shielded us from the worst of the blast,’ Numeon said. The seismic charge had thrown Numeon and his brothers free of the crater. The orks at the centre had been turned into an indistinguishable mass of burned and crushed bodies.

The centre of the crater fell in, and the chamber filled with lethal orange light. The heat spiked.

‘Then let us honour their sacrifice and leave,’ said Orasus.

There were still hundreds of orks in the cavern. They were howling in confusion as the ground gave way. The deep fissures opened, and the molten rock pushed through. The ground fell, then rose again, chunks of the dome floating on the rising magma like ice floes.

‘We have very few seconds,’ Numeon shouted. ‘Let us use them well.’ At any moment, the cavern and everything in it might vanish in a single blast.

The orks were distressed, but they could still see an enemy. They tried to attack. As they charged, chunks of rock split beneath them and tipped them into the magma, and they died, screaming, burning and drowning.

The rock Numeon was standing on upended. He scrambled up the sudden incline, away from the magma. He jumped to the next rock, then to the next, moving quickly. Everything was changing in the cavern. There was nothing to judge, only seconds to make the decisions that each moment demanded, even if the next proved that decision to be fatal.

He was almost at the wall when he realised the cavern’s ceiling was closer. The fragmenting dome was rising.

Caelius had noticed too. ‘We don’t have as far to climb,’ he said.

‘I’m not sure that’s a good thing,’ Numeon answered. Then, with another leap, he was at the wall.

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