☾︎𝑺𝑶𝑳☽︎

It trickled as a reminder of his failures. His heart skipped a beat, then two and he could feel the adrenaline coming off. All around him were corpses of marines, humans, tyranids and the steps of those alive trying to make best of the situation. The air was too suffocating for him, it was too much for him to face alone, he wanted to scream, to lift off and to throw the death mask as far away as possible.

His head came in contact with his gloved hands “What do I have to do…what must be done?” he wanted to cry. The deep gashes all around his body manifested at the same time. Blood curling pain filled his nerves yet he was too tired to scream. He was not young anymore, they were not healing and they continued to bleed.

The irony scent engulfed his lungs, it made him yearn for that feeling of fullfillness again. He looked down at a mangled corpse of a Termagaunt and with one of his hands, he scooped up the red essence and brought it to his mouth. He licked and mouthed at it, he bit down and savoured every last inch until there was nothing left to feast on. His gums hurt again, his canines elongated and his whole maw started hurting again.

The sounds of orders and Thunderhawks soaring the skies stopped, everything around him came to a halt and for a moment he saw through he eyes of that vile creature. He saw himself come at its presence and violently picking it up, he saw his death mask filled to the brim with dust and blood and then nothing.

Violent, he was a violent being, made and forged for war and battles, battles that lasted all of his 1.500 years of agonizing living. He carefully layed down, the engines of his jump pack and life sustaining protocols came to life.

A severe wound on his kidney, trauma to his left tibia, a broken right femur, a collapsed lung, poisoning to a majority of organs and a collapsed second heart. He layed down and turned to his right, in the not far distance he saw the silhouette of Roboute Guilliman giving orders to his personal guards and whoever was nearby. Funny, he talked to him moments prior with whatever vigour was left in his veins but he could not bring himself to care now.

He looked at the sky, a scorching and suffocating grey mixed with brown clouded the once beautiful red sky, red like the cape of his beloved Mephiston. “Where are you…where are you when needed” these were the last words he pronounced before closing his eyes and laying on the ground. He was depleted…he was tired of it all.

Strangely the smell of burning flesh dissipated, his senses where met with a familiar scent, the common sterilized atmosphere of the medical bay. He recognized the hanging cables and the burning of the lit candles near the main interface of the room. The medbay was empty and whatever priest and apothecary was there must have left the floor for quiet some time. He was clad in only his undergarments, a simple red and white cloth tied to his waist.

He sat up and looked around the dimly lit room. His bones protested but he ignored them, instead his gaze was fixaed onto the deathmask at his right. It was placed apon a small shelf and beyond it stood his armor. His battered golden armor was now being repaired by some mechanical arms.

It felt wrong to not wear his helmet, he reached for it and grabbed it by the sides. It was shining like new, a work only he or his lover could do. That shine was supposed to inspire combatants and non belligerant loyalists but also infuse fear to the one stading on the other side.

He took a simple robe, typical of the Blood Angels, and directed himself to the private quarters. Never he lets himself be seen without it for he fears the judgement of others. His room was simple, it had its standars primaris bedding, a table with the lithanies of the chapter and emperor, a small hand where his weapons were set and a small wardrobe where his personal effects were.

Dante knew that some of them were were not his. Mephiston and him shared countless passionate nights there. They renowed their oaths to one another or simply seeked guidence for problems, though they were much different from one another. Dante looked at one of the many books on a pile near his desk, one of those talked about the dangers or, how they called it, the obstacles Psyckers had to endure in order to use their powers to their fullest potential.

His lover was one of the most powerful psyckers in existance, able to directly link and disrupt the Hive Mind, a task only their close ally Tigurius managed to do. His helmet clinged to his face but Dante did not mind, it grew like a second skin overtime. Sometimes, when he looked in the mirror, he was not sure if he could see himself or his Primarch.

He layed down on his bedding and tried to close his eyes to sleep but nothing worked. He tossed and turned around but to no avail. The previous battles felt him exautes yes, but not physically. He needed to repose mentally. As if the Emperor had granted him a single wish, he felt his familiar presence, “There is no need to knock”, he put down the book and then turned to the opening door, there he was.

“Sharp as ever aren’t you?” Mephiston came closer after he pushed a button and closed the door. He was wearing a simple tunic with gold markings and a leather belt with the symbol of the chapter.  Silence corrugated the air, Dante did not want to speak. Minutes passed, afterall it was normal for them to be like this. The Chapter Master sighed, a static coming through his helmet. Mephiston knew already what was wrong with him, he did not need to pry in his mind.

He came closer to his master with an apprehensive expression. He took the mask in his hands and slowly lifted it up “Can I see my beloved’s face? Or is this a privilige reserved only for himself?” His tone was unusually quiet, coated with sadness even, but Calistarius was right nontheless, Dante could not hide his face from his lover and so gave a faint nod. His beloved lifted the helmet a small bit, white hair fell on his shoulders and his chapped lips showed. Dante remained silent until he felt the other’s lips on his.

Dante felt the hesitation radiating from the other like a burning furnace and so wispered he could get it off.  Mephiston did and was met with a tired gaze. It mirrored his completely. “Can I...help better this expression?”.

Rare were these moments and, even if this was temporary, a piece of Dante’s soul burned with unwavering passion. He was the first to seek comfort, he took the other’s hand in his and kissed on the red nuckles until he made eye contact with Mephiston.

The Lord of Death was hungry, his claws embraced Dante’s jaw and kissed him roughly, he demanded access to his mouth and the Chapter Master obliged. His hands placed themselves on the hips of the librarian and kissed back with dampend fervor. From his mouth then Mephiston moved to his jaw, he bit down and nipped at the angle conneting the masseter to the rest of the jaw before moving down to the upper base of Dante’s neck. Dante moaned and shortend the distance between them, making sure their bodies were connected.

“You…calm down Mephiston!” he blurted out with half a smile at the assault on his neck. The other did not speak and in Dante’s mind few words were spoken “You like it and you yearn it”. The Warden did not know how to answer and instead his hands cupped the upper sides of the other’s torso. He was leaning back a bit, trying to maintain balance and not fall on the cot.

Calistarius’s motions became much more precise, as he aimed towards the submental triangle earning a quiet moan in the process. He smiled with pride through his mouth and eyes and began to bite and suck. Dante left him free access and to compensate Mephiston put a hand on the nape of his neck to support it. “You enjoy this, don’t you?” The Lord of Death spoke in a state of trance, his arms snaked up on the back of his lover.

“Luis…” he asked again. The Death Lord heard a groan, a clear…needy filled groan. “Even though you are past your Golden Age, you still manange to suprise me Luis” he laughed. Dante’s right hand was resting on his left shoulder then slowly moved towards the other’s mouth. He looked at his librarian with fatigue yet he smirked.

“I hope you won’t mind…” In a swift manner he bit down Calistariu’s trapezius and closed his jaw, locking him in place. He knew the Vampire would not and so began to suck what blood flowed from the wound. His left hand snaked lower, on the other’s covered navel but dared not to go down further.

Mephiston rested his head onto the other’s and bit down his ear but not applying any dangerous force. Dante’s consciousness flooded with memories of the most recent moments; what happend to his dear Mephiston, how he found him laying on the ground, the shear and absurde pain of the rubicon surgery and…

“𝔑𝔒𝔗 𝔏ℑ𝔎𝔈 𝔗ℌℑ𝔖”

“P҈E҈R҈I҈S҈H҈ B҈Y҈ M҈Y҈ N҈A҈M҈E҈!”

“…”

“W̸h̸e̸r̸e̸ a̸r̸e̸ y̸o̸u̸?”

“M̶y̶ b̶r̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶s̶, a̶l̶l̶ g̶o̶n̶e̶...”

“T̺͆h̺͆i̺͆s̺͆ s̺͆h̺͆a̺͆l̺͆l̺͆ n̺͆o̺͆t̺͆ b̺͆e̺͆ t̺͆h̺͆e̺͆ d̺͆e̺͆a̺͆t̺͆h̺͆ o̺͆f̺͆ m̺͆e̺͆!”

“𝖂𝕳𝕰𝕽𝕰 𝕴𝕾 𝕳𝕰?!”

“𝔏𝔲𝔦𝔰”

…

“Where are you Luis…”

He did not realize he was trembling, only the voice of his Lord shook him awake, the Omophagea. His mouth and maw were covered by blood, his hand still carefully wrapped around the navel. “You...” he did not find any words to give, any answers to propose, anything to say.

“Luis…you do not need to formulate words” his gaze sincere. Mephiston slowly broght him to his lap as they sat down on the cot. Dante kissed him and Calistarius answered, their arms embracing the other body as they did not let go. A small string of saliva carefully connected their lips and rich red blood plasteres their faces. “I am not as young as I used to be. My body is weary, my mind is broken my spirit-” He looked away but before continuing “You need not be” the Death Lord gave that knowing look and kissed him again, this time with quiet passion.

Soon the Chapter Master lowered Mephiston’s robes, exposing fully his toned torso. His hands lingered for a moment to his collarbone and then proceeded further down. The skin was marred with scars which carved canions on the hardened flesh. One went from the right collarbone to the upper side of his pectoral while others directed themselves to every inch of his body.

He could not study it nor look at it for mere seconds as he ended up on the floor in a puny “fetal” position. “What went wrong, I do not understand.” He heaved in pain, breathless sounds came out of his mouth, yet he did not run. That this was sucking his energy out and he did not even crate a clone of himself to live again.

The thing was sleeping, it was sleeping peacefully. Did it even know what peace was? “Joke of nature, maybe this is just a way those foul gods punished me for not taking sides in this whole predicament” he said in exasperation. Fabius did not know what to think next, he may just as well go back and tinker with some limbs.

One could compare him to a child who just discovered building blocks, staking them on one another hoping for the tower to not fall off, and so Fabius did. He took arms, parts of legs, hands, fingers and proceeded to stack them up without much thought. It was unusual for his mind to just go blank. To stop working in an instand, but that creature really did end up causing a void in his malformed soul.

The Manflayer sighed and leaned back on his chair in frustration, what to do next. “I have this thing under my scope, my as well make the most of it”. And so he did, he spent the next four weeks going back to logs, equations, reports, results of all the things he did while creating the embryo.

The first report showed nothing wrong. The embryo was growing at a stable rate, all the nutrients of the life pod were in the norm and there was nothing really wrong with its growth process. By the fifteenth report things started going south; the dendrites did not develope quiet as fast as the somas and thus many of the new neuron structures became less active and more dormant, this obstacle was solved well with some changing into the nutrient plan. Bile shifted priorities every now and then to make sure no prolonged damage could show. Then it was time to observe the growth process of the humeruses (the bone that prolongs from the scapula to form the basic structure of the wing) and now calcium deficency started flaring up on the screens.

The overall process to create that empty vessel was tedius but at every inconveniece, the Spider managed to find a solution, though these solutions did not answer why it was soulless. After reading again and again all the notes he took, he concluded it must have been the way he tried to infuse life into the clone. He got a book from the nearby pile of tomes and read carefully the sections 2.a and 5.e dedicated to explaining the basic fundamentals of cloning.

Souls were a difficult topic for even the most brillian individuals and Bile was no exeption. He already had a replacement for that “individual” in the works, a clone of Fulgrim, but it was still as a cellular stage, useless. Maybe the proto-Sanguinius came like this because Bile rushed the process. Bile thought for a moment, it could not be like this, he never rushed his pets.

He remained silent for some instances and then got up the chair with his book in his left hand. He quickly got down the stairs putting his right hand on the handrail and directed his footing to that life pod. “Alright, before I incinerate you to smitherins I would like to know if you still have basic cognitive capabilities to exploit” Fabius got a small steel crate and sat on it, he opened the book at the first page and turned it to the other’s face.

He ignored the need to writhe and continued to stare into those brown eyes. “Sanguinius” looked at him with what could be described as a blank stare and then looked at the thing in front of him. The cables supporting his neck and left side of the torse strained at the motions and bubbles came out of his mouth, he bared his teeth at those cables but did not do anything. Fabius tapped at the glass to get his attention and, bored as ever, rested his chin on his left hand and sighed in frustration. “I made you, I hope you can use the brain I gave to you” he grunted and groaned. Already a waste of time.

The clone looked at the object in front of him and stared for quiet some time, he looked at what was in front of him but could not make anything of it. He avarted his gaze to his creator and tilted his head to the side, his stare was met with annoyance. “You can’t do shit, can you? I mean, look at you…” Fabius got up “your feathers scarcely cover your wing structure, your canines and incisors aren’t supposed to be that sharp, your hair was supposed to be blond and not brown! Your eyes may just be acceptable but you? Your body can not even sustain gene-seed…it shuts down like a broken electrical system and you are…abhorrent”.

In the many Dataslates he had, DNA mutations showed a prominent presence, the very own building blocks that made Sanguinius himself were completely mirrored in the genetic makeup down to the last very atom. Such thing never occurred and maybe that was why Fabius could not comprehend how he came to that result.

“Your very own genetic composition if fucked up to the last helix. The purins and pyramidines were supposed to latch onto eachother to form the most basic ladder for further fundations to be added, yet they managed to stablize themselves by adding specific molecular changes from the gene-seed.” Fabius realized at that moment that maybe not everything was a waste of time. He stopped speaking and got to the projector in the room, at the centre. “Your DNA absorbed the gene-seed one and completely overrode it and abosorbed it” He put the imput of the 3D projector and when the interface came to life, he lost his balance and fell to the ground with a beaming smile on his face.

“It used it as a template to..” he got back up again “to form compatible structures in the major groves were proteins then latched on to, yet it didn’t completely nullify the material given” Fabius could not believe his words. He managed to create a partial new primarch. He did not need the Emperor’s scientific experties, he only needed to rebrand and perfectionate that model.

“You are still a failure, I’ll dispose of you when I can but in the meantime, I may just as well keep you alive for further investigation...after all your brother Fulgrim might need help”

There where two floors; if Fabius decided to check on one of his his tiny creatures, he’d just go down the dirty marble stairs and look at the data showing on the glass of the gestation pod sealed in the walls. If he was not satisfied with the results, he could just take it way and open it up on one of the many surgery table. He didn’t care to clean them up, rotting innards covered the majority of those black ceramite tables and when they became a liability, he would just gather them and toss them aside.

The experiment could be described as just a glob of flesh and meat, it had no emotions and a bearly functioning brain. It was pink, the genitals sticking out on a part of the body where they were not supposed to be and its legs were so malformed it was a miracle they twitched with life. It did not have arms nor hair the pectorals were hung loose and the sounds it made were horrible; it grunted, heaved, it was spasming, coughing and probably having seizures. It had a tiny eye but it didn’t develop quiet well to capture the light and so to form images in its supposed brain.

It took Fabius four months to develop that horrid thing, four months of his precious life wasted on an attempt to grow a primarch. Fabius looked at its “child” coldly, it was not worth keeping it alive but he could still look at what went wrong with the germinal period and so on to the second trimester. “It was a waste of time to try and recreate Angron” Fabius sighed with half regret. He put a sequence of three letters and two numbers and the glass opened.

Viscous dark green liquid gushed out in the grate below making a mess and the thing squirmed. Its tiny body reacted to the cold, flinching and grunting like a pug without air. Fabius took it out and looked at the monster before his eyes, not a hint of compassion in his twisted mind.

“Guess you’ll have to meet your brothers soon, little thing” The scientist wasted no time in forcefully taking it out, he was annoyed at the tiny twitchy legs that pressed on his chest. The pod closed with a beeping sound and he climbed the stairs. He dropped it on one of the many tables and with a saw immidiatelly cut it open. It wasn’t long before it stopped “screaming”.

Fabius got annoyed he didn’t find anything useful other than the obvious: “gene-seed does not mix well with undercooked meat” and so he tossed the creation in the incinerator on the other side of the first floor. He punched the table, by a miracle not crushing it and sat on it. Black rotting blood was leaking where once the thing layed and Fabius sat on without care.

He sighed in frustration; what went wrong? He got back up and went near the wall filled with formulas and diagrams of anatomy and all of his findings. “Why can’t I create anything that works?! Why could the Emperor and not me!?” he yelled in anger and with a swift move of his right leg, he launched the surgery table away.

It cracked on impact and tore apart the lower floor, the impact shook the room and some of his dataslates and papers fell and shattered on the pavement. One of these lit up. Fabius looked at the mess he made but couldn’t care less to fix it, instead he marched towards that half broken dataslate.

One of his mechanical appendages picked it up and put it infront of him. “Caos, just a shitty nuisance” he charmed with half a laugh as he looked at the essay explaining the possibility of purifying the Immaterium.

After he finished reading, he put it way on his table dedicated on dissecting corpses and walked at the wall on the left of the incinerator. He opened the two small doors and took a vial of cryo-frozen DNA, it was the very biological essence of Sanguinius. “Puryfing Caos…” the engines of his suit roared as he got back up, the mech arms moved on their own as they got a hold of the other vials and old torn papers.

Fabius looked down as if he was calculating. “The so called Anathema, the antidote to Caos” he quickly turned and ran to the wall with his findings.

He put down carefully the vial of DNA and took a dataslate, he quickly wrote down some inputs and so many mechanical arms exited the ceiling. They took the various vials and papers and Bile went to the work station dedicated to experimenting on Caos, he tossed aside the arm of a Khorne Marine and reached for his “tool box”. A lone feather of the Great Angel was now in his hands. “Why recreate a failure of the Emperor when I can give life to his greatest son”.

It didn’t take long for bile to develope an embryo. Right now, no mutations accured and the vital parameters were all in the norm. It would’ve been like this for some time, time he could use to develop a Caos essence, in the end…he did have some Librarian brains he could use.

At twelve weeks Bile discovered it was a boy. The fetus was immobile in the liquid, it gave him nutrients and worked as a functional uterus. Bile opened his mouth in awe and looked again and again at the reports on the nerby display. “No…no mutations…but the wings, WHERE ARE THEY!?” He looked again at the exposed side of the fetus, just small stubs at the end on his neck, too small to be functional yet but he just had to wait more.

After another two years, the clone was fully created. The madman beamed with joy at the sight of its fully “functional creation” but problems quickly rose. It was the size of a firstborn marine and its hair...they where not the golden he was promised, they were of a deep brown. The feathers where scrowny and didn’t cover most of the muscle structure. When it opened its eyes…they were brown yes, but empty.

Only then Fabius realized what he had created, what thing he gave life to. He did not want to believe it, it could not be. Dread filled his heart, anguish clouded his brain, fear sunk deep in his guts and so sorrow, anger, pain followed. The very existance of that clone carved deep gushes in his innards.

He wanted to puke, he wanted to vomit his hearts out and scream in fear but he did not. He stood there, frozen with his eyes staring at the others. They looked at each other and the creature opened its mouth, long canines showed blood on their roots, the incisors behind them, albeight smaller, still showed signs of being sharp edges. No sounds came out of that mouth and even if they did…Bile couln’t hear them. With his left hand, it scraped the glass almost signaling it wanted to come out.

The caos marine didn’t move “This is not what I wanted, I fused your body with a soul…it bonded…and now you do not have any..” Fabius looked away at the container of his purified caos essence he worked on in the meantime, he then looked back at his “supposed anathema”. The soul that had to inspire, to calm, to sooth, to be bright, intelligent, to be Sanguinius was not there…his primarch was not there.

The clone came closer with his head, its eyes darted from one direction to the other, it was…looking. “You are thinking aren’t you?” Bile took a step back and allowed his “child” to look around. He did not know what to do.

@w-40k-2 I give you this humble thing. I would love to write a small fic on your B.A oc so you are invited to info dump me as much as you love. Mother I do not crave violence, I crave knowledge!