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Aberration – Extract

A Black Library Publication Imprint

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Aberration

by Jake Ozga

A girl walks alone in the forest at night. Her bare feet leave a trail of perfectly defined footprints in the crisp, freshly fallen snow, a trail that weaves between the grasping shadows of winter-bare trees like the tracks of a small and hunted creature. She is guided only by moonlight, but at times it is so bright that when it shines upon the snow between the trees, the radiance dazzles her. Walking alone in the sempiternal Shyishan hinterlands is not without danger and though she has done this many times before, she has rarely strayed quite so far from the village that, until so recently, she thought of as home.

She is lost in reverie – as she so often is – and so does not realise that she is also in danger of becoming truly lost, until a stumble upon a toppled tree branch startles her from her tangled thoughts and she considers her unfamiliar surroundings. Nothing stirs. The absoluteness of the silence can be overwhelming, yet she has always found it a comfort. She has lived in these woods for all of her young life: playing in them as a child and exploring them as she grew into adulthood, and because of this she knows that the forest is not to be taken lightly, not when so much has changed, and especially not now, when there is no one to come to her aid if she should call out for help.

The girl’s name is Marianne. It is an unremarkable name in this unremarkable, isolated corner of the Realm of Death. And Marianne herself is not remarkable. Or at least, she is not beautiful. Certainly not in the way that the Shyishan aristocrats are beautiful, when glimpsed through the windows of their dark coaches as they rattle along the amethyst-stone roadways from their castles on the northern coast to their palaces in the Innerlands. She knows this well enough: her face is not gaunt enough, her skin is not pale enough, and her hair – though dark – is not so pure a shade of midnight black as that of those nobles, who seem to her so otherworldly. There is too much evidence of vitality about her for her to be considered beautiful: she is too quick to smile and laugh; her wide, brown eyes restlessly consume every detail of her quiet world. She is too interested in her surroundings. She is not distant and unobtainable, as beauty should be; she does not remain detached and uninvolved. She participates too much. She takes too much pleasure in the simple daily rituals and circumstances of the living, even in times such as these when there is little pleasure to be found.

She is – was – the middle child of a large and unruly litter of seven. When she was younger, she was protected in all things by her older sisters, just as she was in turn fiercely protective of her younger siblings. Her parents were the rarest of people: kind and happy and deeply in love. They were well liked in the village, and never raised a hand to their children even though some would say that the children, hellions all, would often have deserved it. The children were left to their own devices, confident that they would always have each other. During the day they would play in the woods or among the villagers, who tolerated them well enough. And at night they slept together in the single room of their modest cottage, lying intertwined in a tangle of skinny arms and legs, whispering and pinching and squirming until their father, exhausted from his labours, would shout at them to quieten down, inevitably sending the children into paroxysms of silent giggling. And so, even though she is only an unremarkable peasant girl in a cold and cruel region of a cold and cruel realm, her life had managed to be comfortable and secure. More than that, it had managed, for so long, to be happy.

Now, Marianne’s cheeks are flushed pink with exertion as she carries a heavy pack on her back. All of her worldly possessions, every memory of her eighteen years of life is in this pack, and it is not so large as all that. Her footsteps bite through the crisp, fresh snowfall. There should not be so much snow at this time of year; her feet are becoming numb. Her breath comes heavily from between her lips to vanish in clouds of steam in the piercing cold. She is an aberration: she is a creature of youth and life in a place of the perfect and immaculate tranquillity of death.

She comes at last to the foot of a hill and begins to climb, following a twisting trail to emerge above the trees. She pauses to look back the way she has come, back towards the distant village, where even now the smoke from a handful of hearth fires can be seen coiling up into the bright night sky, illuminated by moonlight reflected on the snow. At the top of the hill is her destination: a place of legend from her childhood, a place that the soothsayers speak about in hushed and reverent tones, lest they invoke some ancient curse. The trail leads now between ruined stone walls and across a ditch that might once have been a moat and into an enclosed garden surrounded by skeletal birch trees. Her footsteps are hushed by a carpet of desiccated catkins that turn to dust as she passes. She cannot help but feel that she is being watched. In the distance, a wolf howls.

The castle itself is hewn from crumbling black stone and shaped like a hand grasping at the moon, with tumbledown towers that remind her of the mutilated fingers of thieves and pickpockets. Not even this place, hidden away in a remote and forgotten region of Shyish, has entirely escaped the earth tremors and aftershocks that so recently wreaked havoc upon the realm. Arrow-slit windows and embrasures in the remains of these towers look down across the forest and upon the distant village, and in these windows there is the flickering glow of torchlight.

The torchlight triggers a memory. Those few villagers that had dared to visit her at the blackened remains of her cottage in the days before she left had asked her: What will you do now? And she had answered them with a shrug and a sad smile, and the villagers, upon seeing that strange smile, had surreptitiously waved their hands in poorly concealed gestures of warding, or spat in the bloodstained snow when they thought she did not see.

What will you do now, now that everything has changed, now that you no longer have each other, now that you no longer have anyone?

These last things they did not say aloud, but she saw the questions in their eyes. And of course they did not say that she could no longer stay in the village, but this too she read as plain as day on their ashen, downcast faces. She saw their fear, their mistrust, and she knew they now thought her cursed. The villagers had suffered too, they reminded her. They had all lost someone to the storms of wild magic that pillaged the land, setting trees ablaze with smokeless fire and cracking the earth. But none had suffered like Marianne, who had gone alone into the forest one night, and had returned to find her home, her life, reduced to nothing but scorched bones, picked over by wolves that had been drawn to the scent of death and sorcery. She had buried what little she could.

‘Are you a witch, Marianne?’ the village children had asked.

Though she was not much older than they, and though they had played together not so many years ago, now there was a distance between them that seemed to her to be immeasurable and insurmountable. She was gathering herbs and mushrooms, as she had every day since she was old enough to safely do so, for the poisonous varieties far outweighed the edible.

‘Did you kill your brothers and sisters with magic?’ They were wide-eyed, pale children and no strangers to death. ‘Can you teach us magic?’ they had whispered. When she had not replied, they started to lose interest. ‘Will you kill us too, Marianne?’ they said and then they had run, screaming and laughing into the woods. An image had appeared in her mind’s eye unbidden: a vision of a hangman’s noose, the black rope coiling and twisting around the pale skin of her neck. And she had thought: It is time for me to leave.

And now, she reaches the entrance to the castle. Her feet and hands are numb from the cold; she staggers under the weight of her pack though it contains only a few mementos, relics of the life she has lost. The walk has been much harder than she anticipated. The castle entranceway is hidden from sight by piles of fallen stones: the earthquakes have reduced the castle in stature, but its presence remains undiminished. It looms, ancient and foreboding, the black stone infused with an indescribable sense of menace. The great door is made from ghostwood, ashen white against the dark surrounds and ice cold to the touch. In the centre of the door there is an iron knocker in the shape of a snarling wolf’s head.

She hesitates. The last time she saw such a creature, the fur of its muzzle was stained crimson with blood.

The ring gripped in the wolf’s jaws is so heavy she has to set aside her pack in order to lift it with both hands. The sound of iron against iron echoes across the midnight forest. Inscribed on the wolf’s head is a symbol she recognises immediately: a single letter ‘V’. For as long as she has been alive, and indeed for many centuries before that, these lands and all the people in them have belonged to the Vyrkos.

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Warhammer horror

A Black Library Publication Imprint

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1,D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Nuala Kinrade.

Aberration © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. Aberration, Warhammer Horror, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-80026-745-9

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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