Chapter Text
Timestamp: 9.4.4.1173
A storm raged outside, its gales and thunder shaking the house. Lightning lit up the sealed window, illuminating their makeshift barracks with thin flashes of light. Eorlund could swear he heard stones mixed in with the pelting rain as the mighty tempest raged overhead.
Being born on Inwit, the Primarch’s own homeworld, he had grown accustomed to storms. His childhood memories returned to him. He remembered bunkering down to let snowstorms pass as his family made the trip through the high mountains to the Imperial Fist’s fortress monastery. That storm had still raged as Eorlund was tested and found compatible with the Chapter’s geneseed. So, when Aladar called for him and told him that a “highstorm” would hit that night, Eorlund thought it laughable that the highprince would spend the storm in his bunker rather than the man’s lavish quarters.
Now he understood. This “highstorm” was a primal monster, a kindred of the Ruinstorm and other great tempests of myth. Eorlund now fully understood why the trees pulled in their leaves and few fauna other than crustaceans could thrive on this world. While he had been on planets wracked with radioactive soil and corrosive gasses, those worlds had the technology of the Imperium to keep them alive. These people had steel and stone alone to sustain them.
Eorlund heard a boulder fall into the yard beyond Aladar’s manor. He tried to prevent his mind from lingering on thoughts of debris striking the more structurally unsound sections of the building. He told himself that this was a normal occurrence on this world and that the people here had long ago adapted and created measures to keep themselves from being crushed by the storm. That did little to silence his thoughts. He held no anxiety for himself. His mind was concentrated instead on the civilians he had seen about the camps, the poor and the families of soldiers. Would they be given shelter?
The Imperial Fist turned in his bunk, putting his back towards the window and its flashing edges. Instead, he was forced to stare at the spren instead.
Isha, a cultivationspren she called herself, ran a circuit across the wall above Eorlund’s bed. Each pass was unique, slightly different with the previous go. Sometimes she would make a simple oval with the fading vines she left behind, other times Isha slowly covered every inch of the surface before turning back.
“Must you do that?” Eorlund mumbled, putting his arm over his face. The vines paused and formed into Isha’s face.
“What are you doing up? Sharky’s been asleep for hours,” she asked, head growing to one side to look at him quizzically.
“Sleep comes easily to Anake. He is a better hunter than I. And your running about does not help matters,” Eorlund said quietly, careful not to wake the other marine in his pile of blankets. The Imperial Fist could not imagine how Anake would react to Isha, but surmised it wouldn’t be good. Somehow, she kept herself hidden from him and even the guards around the compound never reacted to her. Some warp trickery of hers no doubt.
“I just feel so alive. Don’t you feel it too? That power in the air…” Thinking for a moment, Eorlund did observe that the spren seemed more hyperactive than any other time he had seen her.
“No,” he said dryly.
“Oh, shush, you. Let me enjoy myself,” Isha replied. “Can’t you just decide to sleep? Isn’t that what humans do? Seems silly to throw away a third of your lives to just laying there with their eyes closed. Must be pretty fun. ”
“That’s not how sleep works. Its an involuntary process required to—” Eorlund stopped, realizing what he was doing, cordially conversing with the neverborn. “It is too late for this. Go ask someone else.”
Isha stuck out her tongue at him and morphed back into a mass of vines, scurrying away, hopefully to go bother someone else. That left Eorlund’s wall blank. He breathed out a sigh. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on emptying his mind and slowing his breathing.
As the minutes grew long, the marine faded into unconsciousness. Sleep finally took him in the earliest hours of the morning, when the storm was still at its height. When dreams finally came, Eorlund twitched and moved in his sleep. Isha, when she returned, thought it to be so unlike her charge that she briefly considered waking up Anake. Was her knight being hurt? She decided against speaking to the Carcharodon, instead keeping vigil over her spasmodic charge.
Unbeknownst to the Imperial Fist as he tossed and turned in sleep, another man fitfully dreamed this night as the highstorm raged above.
Eorlund Gerlach found himself standing firmly on stone ground. A circular pattern of bricks, like the orbits of a star with him as a planet, laid before him. He looked down at himself. He wore armor that was not yellow. The armor of another man. A horrible sword in his hands. Eorlund shuddered, unable to keep himself from shaking. The vision changed. The armor was gone; instead he wore the plain training garb of an aspirant, a dark glove embroidered on his simple tabard. The sword disappeared, replaced by a training gladius. Eorlund’s hand shook as he forced himself to drop the blade. It clattered on the bricks and faded from view.
Then he noticed the blood.
All around him, xenos and human bodies lay in states of decay. Like the wreckage he and Anake had found first upon the plains, red and orange blood intermixed upon the stone.
Did he do this?
No, Eorlund reassured himself. These corpses wore primitive armor, bronze and leather with ornamental skirts. As his ceramite was to the local’s chainmail, so was the armor worn by Aladar’s men to what these people wore. Orange blood caked the human’s weapons and the xeno’s strange blades dripped red.
This was the remains of a battle of particular desperation.
The circling pattern of bricks Eorlund stood upon, he now noticed, lay at the center of a plaza. Simple buildings ran in angled rows around him. A town square. Eorlund stood in a city filled with the dead.
Eorlund slowly walked through the corpses, leather sandals quieting his steps. The city was expansive, easily able to hold tens of thousands of humans. Great blades of stone extended into the sky. Hundreds of feet tall, they looked like a ring of swords held against the heavens above. He saw a citadel in the distance, a figure standing at a railing looking down on the carnage. Another walked out to stand beside him.
Someone still lived. Someone survived. This knowledge lessened the weight on Eorlund’s heart.
As he walked through the city, he saw more people. Humans picked through the debris and wreckage, salvaging what they could from their once mighty city. They looked Alethi to him, similar to the people he had met in the war camps.
Something rumbled in the distance, like thunder or the groanings of a god.
Eorlund ignored it. He approached one of the scavengers, a woman in a simple brown dress and a haunted look, who was digging through a pile of bricks. The Imperial Fist put a hand on her shoulder.
“What occurred here?” he asked, soft and kindly as he could manage.
She did not respond and kept pulling bricks away from the pile, dark eyes staring down unfocused.
A WAR, A DESOLATION OF KINGDOMS, THE END OF THE WORLD.
Eorlund’s head whipped to the skies and the stormclouds that filled them. Thunderheads heavy with rain and lightning billowed from the distance, extending as wide as the heavens. And the tempest opened its mouth to speak, a mouth that crossed the sky. Two eyes, like swirling gyres, stared down upon the marine.
It was the face of the infinite.
OUTLANDER. CHILD OF NO SHARD. MUTATE. I NAME YOU ABOMINATION.
“By the Throne…” Eorlund swore as he stared up into the sky.
SPEAK NOT OF HIM TO ME, THIEF. HE AND THEY WERE SEALED AWAY FROM HERE LONG AGO, BEFORE I WAS. The voice boomed from the sky, like the clashing of stormclouds or the blasts of orbital guns. Yet, none of the scavengers seem to notice. They did not even glance up as the thunderous voice roared. Eorlund stared, no response coming to his lips. Was this some greater neverborn? A champion of the Ruinous Powers?
Eventually, words came to him.
“I have stolen nothing, only taken what was offered to me.” Did this thing have a connection to Aladar? Did it see Eorlund using the highprince’s resources as theft? A strange idea, but not impossible. Eorlund could imagine a neverborn, especially one that claimed this world as its own, thinking so.
YOU LIE. I HEARD YOUR OATHS AND SOUGHT TO DENY THEM FOR YOU ARE NOT OF HONOR.
Now Eorlund’s voice returned to him in full.
“You are the abomination, foul apparition of the Warp! A neverborn speaks to me of honor? Preposterous! Honor is anathema to your kind. Dorn’s blood runs through my veins. I am born and bred of honor!”
YOU SPEAK WITH PASSION AND YOUR WORDS REVEAL YOUR AFFINITY. THE ENEMY HOLDS YOU. NOT MERELY A MUTATE, BUT A SERVANT OF ODIUM I SEE BEFORE ME. BEGONE.
Anger swelled in Eorlund. How dare this neverborn insult him so, insult his Primarch so! He tensed his hand, muscle memory reached for a weapon. The air around him wavered, like heat above a fire, only seen by its difference from reality. Something built within him.
LEAVE MY WORLD. USE WHAT MEANS YOU CAME HERE BY. GEARS AND BLADES SHADOW YOUR PATH.
“I will not leave without slaying you! Your blood will wet my fist. Your bones will break beneath my heel. I am the Bane of his foes and the woes of the treacherous. I am your end, creature of ruin!” Eorlund roared at the sky. He reeled back his fist and, mind clouded by the righteous fury of the Emperor’s faithful, attempted to punch the sky. His fist rocketed forward, a battlecry on his lips, and—
—Anake grabbed it out of the air. Eorlund stared at the other marine in shock.
“I never thought a space marine could be so afraid of a storm,” the Carcharodon sneered, squeezing his grey skinned hand around Eorlund’s closed fist. The Imperial Fist staggered back, confusion and weariness overwhelming him. The other marine let his fist go as Eorlund fell back onto his bed. His bed…
Eorlund was back in their rooms in Aladar’s manor. He heard the soft patter of rain against the walls. The storm had mostly passed.
“What… what happened?” he asked the other marine. Anake glared at him, thick arms crossed.
“You were mad. Screaming and yelling while walking about. Truly a shame to see an Astartes lose their mind so young. Must be some failing in the Fist geneseed.”
Eorlund wiped sweat from his brow. His head ached, blood pounding inside his skull. What was that? A dream? A nightmare? He remembered the words spoken by the expansive face in the storm. The creature’s condemnation echoed in his head like thunder through a mountain pass.
“Can I sleep now? Or are you planning on having another bout of spontaneous madness?” Anake asked. Thunder boomed in the far distance. The stormfront had long left them behind, but its fury continued into the far horizon.
“Did you hear a voice?” Eorlund asked, looking back up at the other marine.
“I heard you speaking gibberish and shaking your fist at nothing,” Anake grumbled.
“I- I heard—” Eorlund stopped. He briefly considered confiding in the Carcharodon, telling him of his dreams, of the strange occurrences he had noticed around himself, of the spren he could not be rid off, but just as quickly decided against it. Anake would neither understand nor be of help. He was no Librarian, skilled with psychic talents able to remove this errant warp-thing. Anake would only think him mad, driven insane. Nothing good would come of sharing with the other marine.
“Leave me be,” Eorlund grumbled, sitting back onto his bunk wearily.
“Leave you be! You’re the frakking bastard that won’t leave me be. Leave you be, ha!” Anake cursed, stomping away. He muttered vitriol to himself all the way to the door, where he grabbed his cloak and began wrapping his arms in bandages.
“Where are you going?” Eorlund asked, exhaustion taking the hardness from his words.
“If you’re gonna rave like a madman, I’m going out. One of those Rangu-damned taverns better be open, or I swear to the Forgotten One—” With that Anake walked out of their barrack, slamming the door behind him.
Eorlund sighed and laid back down on his bunk.
Isha curled her way up one of the bed posts, forming her face from vines atop the wooden block.
“Are you okay, Eorlund? I think you scared Anake,” she said softly. No matter the volume, her words seemed to always make it to his ears, though he did not know why.
“Do not mistake the brute’s pestering for concern. He cares as little for me as I do for him.” Eorlund narrowed his eyes at the spren. “Nor should you speak with such familiarity to me, abomination. You persist due to me lacking the ability to slay you.”
“Eorlund…”
“Silence, creature. As I said to the shark, leave me be.” With that, Eorlund turned over, facing away from Isha, and began again his pursuit of sleep.
Isha watched her knight as he faded into sleep, a phenomenon she still failed to understand. The cultivationspren was frustrated, confused, and concerned.
Frustrated because her charge remained aloof with her despite her every attempt to endear herself to him.
Confused about his strange tendencies, the references she did not understand, and a thousand other things that made up Sergeant Eorlund Gerlach (like which was his name? He seemed to be called Eorlund by the other giant person, but she wasn’t exactly sure if Sergeant was a name either. She had heard a lot of people around camp be called Sergeant. Maybe it was a really common name, like Heb or Doug. For all she knew, Gerlach was his actual name).
And finally, concerned for his oath. Isha knew her purpose instinctually, knew how it operated, its limits and the path it set both of them on, even if she couldn’t put any of it into words, at least words that the big yellow lummox would understand. He treated any mention of Investiture, Realmatic Theory, Axi, or spiritwebs as superstitious nonsense. Isha had tried to find the words he understood, but her knowledge of him was so limited. Eorlund told her nothing of his own history, nothing about where he was born, who his parents were, even any details about his enigmatic “chapter.” How could she possibly figure out how to help him on his path without getting to know him?
Eorlund and Isha’s joined purpose was not the only growing point of concern. Isha had only got the tail end of the human’s outburst. Eorlund shouted at the sky in some language that neither she nor Anake seemed to understand. Anger and hatred poured off of him. Relief had flooded her like rain when Eorlund seemed to finally be pulled out of his fit. But, even then, would it happen again? What could cause—
Isha felt the tug.
She unwrapped her face, losing any mimicry of humanity and becoming a tangle of vines atop the bedpost. Growing at speed, Isha crossed the bed and climbed up the wall. She glanced back at her knight, eyes shut, arm covering his head, before she squeezed through a tiny gap in the barred window and left into the darkness before dawn.