Jubal’s hands told the story Jubal’s face did not. Bolter. Sword. Aquila. The same pattern, unthinking, religious - the kind of thing the chaplains would have an eye for, if any still lived.
Something slithered in the back of his mind. It promised to kill him. It promised to set him free. It promised the Imperium itself.
Bolter. Sword. Aquila. Ground oneself by what one knows. Wisdom is the enemy of madness. Most unreality events are survivable. A full one fifth have no severe lasting effects. The voice was in the sword, not his skull. What was in his skull was his own.
The thing in Jubal’s skull (or his sword) began to describe what his brothers had been thinking when they died, and how it had happened. Atreus - noble, dashing, warrior-poet Atreus - choked on his own vomit as power-armoured fists caved his skull in, brain stopped short on a curse. Vandren - calculating, curious, patient - wept as they burned him, before his eyes flash-steamed into vapour, grand schemes all replaced with pain, walls and walls of numb, animal pain that took the Space Marine out of him. Uthir - young, Jubal’s ward, fine sergeant one day - lost control of his skull-voice. His last thoughts were filled with something vast, toothsome, -
Bolter. Sword. Aquila. Something rumbled through the icy outer hull, into his armour, tightly maglocked as he was to the outside of the station. Like a tick on its hide. If he tilted his head, he could see the top battlements of the strike cruiser currently hollowing out his life, docked by boarding tubes to the fortress monastery, coring it out corridor by corridor, battle brother by battle brother.
Jubal wished he could feel something other than the numb, animal desire not to die, or rather, something in his mind suggested that he should wish to feel that way.
The voice suggested something unpleasant about Jubal’s soul. Such mockery was easily endured, the lazy lies of a beast used to easier prey. What took some hexagrammatic wards and forbidden words, Jubal accomplished through sheer indifference. All he wanted now was to kill, and the path to that was clean, clear and right ahead of him. Bolter, sword, Aquila. They’d find his sanctuary. They’d realise he was missing. They’d comb the augurs and long scopes and sniffer servitors, and they’d find him, and they’d kill him, and they might, for his inconvenience, torture him into something like a confession first.
Jubal did not fear pain. Jubal Knew No Fear at all, not in the braying, hollering fashion of the Wolves, or in the brutal focus of the Templars, but in the simple manner in which all his emotions felt different and used up. Brotherhood had never been for him, but here, they had accepted that, which was a brotherhood of its own, gone now, leaching into the void with the servitors and relics and debris of the hundreds of lives aboard the station.
Here, they had made Jubal into something more. They had begun the great work. If Xana, and Medregrad, and Sarum could forge bolt-shells and frag grenades, was it such madness to suggest that Ryza, and Mars could one day place hellblades and plagueswords and stranger weapons besides in the hands of imperial soldiery? The neverborn were not evil; they were not anything at all. Strip back the patronage and the pageantry and the ritual, and they were just predators. You kept them like a hunting hawk; hooded, hungry, never trusted, always respected.
Here, on the edge of the Eye, where the Archenemy and the Imperium stood side by side, the Relictors had forged something so great as to be beyond the reckoning of man. Here, on the edge of the Eye, the Relictors were bleeding out.
Bolter. Sword. Aquila. Jubal waited. The voice spoke. Death sang on the vox. Eventually, someone said his name.
“Jubal.”
Syro. Apothecary. His voice sounded wet and small.
“Brother.”
“20”
“That all?”
“From four battle companies. We died well.” (Syro lied)
“Their location.”
“Nave. They’re taking as much promethium as they can before they glass us.”
“Hnf. Animals.”
“Jubal-“
Jubal prepared for the inevitable death speech. The oaths of revenge. The pleas to Emperor and Primarch. Syro had been kind, Syro had never questioned Jubal’s appetites, and thus Jubal would indulge his, and listen.
“Make the fuckers pay.”
A pleasant surprise. A wet sound. Another bead and another name blinking from the viewscreen, gone forever.
20 was possible. A struggle, but possible. These ones were sentimental about their neophytes, which would help. He’d start with them first. A few minutes of agonising crawling, icy hand over icy hand against the frozen hull, brought him to a bulkhead.
Compared to pulling the door open, the scouts required far less force. Disgusting, really, to bring boys on a mission like this; like the fall of his Chapter was some Codex exercise. Their blood tasted sweet and rich with anger, violence, and the last vestiges of terror. The hypno could only do so much for the young ones, after all. The voice yawped and screamed with delight.
To say Jubal found no pleasures in life would be a lie, he simply had very few. He was grateful he was so good at them. In this fashion 20 became 10, then 5, then 1, then a shuttle, deck wet with blood, tiny against the vast and cold depths of the sky.
