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Born of Flame – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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BORN OF FLAME

No one saw him die. The jungle just came alive and took him. Soundlessly, the trooper was simply gone. His slayer moved as a blur, blending with the shadows until it was lost in the heat haze. Scant light penetrated the dense leaf canopy above. Men, shouting and panicking in a tightly packed column, went for their lamp packs. It was stifling in the heady gloom. Heat thickened the air, but the troopers’ bodies cooled with growing fear. Stabbing light beams sent night-beetles scurrying for dark hollows. Vine serpents hung inert in mimicry of their namesakes in hope of being overlooked. If only the men could play dead like that and the predator would pass… Flat leaves, that were not really leaves at all, heaved and pulsed, but there was no sign of the monster. Cries of panic subsided, usurped by a quiet tension as the jungle swallowed voices and stole the soldiers’ resolve. The discipline-master of the 888th Phaerian Imperial Army held up a clenched fist.

Still. Stay still… and listen. If we listen, we will live.

His brocade and jacket seemed incongruous amongst his bare- and barrel-chested charges. Phaerian death-worlders were brutish, slab-muscled men used to deltas and trackless swamps. Skulls jangled on their bandoliers, the rictus mouths clacking as if in amusement. Camo tattoos striped their pugnacious faces but couldn’t hide their fear. This was supposed to be their element.

Hearts beating in two thousand chests made a louder clamour than the entire jungle in that moment. The forest held its breath.

Lifting his puniter-stave, the discipline-master was about to order the advance when the cyber-hawk perched on his shoulder shrilled. The warning was too late. As if exhaling again, the jungle opened its maw and the discipline-master disappeared. One moment he was there, the next he was gone. Just like the trooper. They were being picked off.

Snap fire from a dozen rifles chased the hole left by the discipline-master but the trail was cold before the soldiers had time to realise they were aiming at nothing. Order went with him, Army overseers powerless to prevent the two thousand-strong infantry group from unleashing carnage with their auto-carbines and scatter-locks. Hot las and solid shot spat out in all directions as the men vented their fear until their mags ran dry. Sections of Rapier and Tarantula gunners added heavier firepower to the barrage. The thick jungle in the immediate vicinity became a mulched flatland in under a minute. Electro-goads and vox-amplified orders bellowed at ear-bleeding volume eventually brought the madness under control.

A dumb quietude fell, undercut by heavy breathing and nervous whispers.

The cessation was brief.

Out of the darkness came monsters. Vast beasts, their ululating cries louder than any augmented overseer, crashed into the column of men, killing Phaerians by the score. On one flank, the line bent and broke as hulking, scaled things with horned snouts armoured by bony carapace drove into it. The first Phaerians to die were ground to paste, whilst those that came next were thrown into the air or gored to death. Other beasts, smaller but still many times larger than a man, bullied in alongside the hulks. Saurian like their larger cousins, but avian in nature and aspect, they cantered and sprang amongst the shattered platoons, rending with dewclaws. With their coherency so brutally broken, the scattered Phaerians were easy meat. Hooded riders snapped off shots with long, alien rifles, their conical helms gleaming pearlescent white.

From above, a shriek split the air and a second later, the leaf canopy was broken by a flock of winged lizards. A lucky burst of Rapier fired chewed up the membranous wings of one, sending rider and beast into a fatal dive, but the rest of its kindred reduced the jubilant Army gunners to a visceral mist.

The air was thick with blood and screaming as the tattered regiment consolidated into the clearing they’d made. Not so much a column now, the slowly diminishing circle of bodies offered feeble resistance to the aliens and their scaled beasts. It was no place for a last stand, and soon the Imperial Army was running again, back through the darkness. Branch tendrils came alive snagging wrists and ankles, sucking bogs opened up to swallow men whole. Insect hordes rallied, filling mouths and ears as the entire jungle animated to repel the interlopers.

‘Forward for Terra!’ an overseer began, before his throat was speared by an alien lance. Its bearer shucked his body free with a desultory jerk before rearing over a band of wounded Phaerians on its saurian steed. The meaning in the alien’s glowering gaze was clear.

Death to intruders.

It charged. A reverberant war cry shot through the jungle like lighting, calling its rider kindred, and in moments the Phaerians were engulfed by a stampede. The crack of scatter-locks and auto-carbines was brief and ineffectual. Rear rankers, far enough from the fighting to not yet be skewered, crushed or shredded, just ran. These men, these death-worlder brutes, wailed as they scrambled through the heat and the mire. Winged beasts, let loose in the rein, dived on prey at leisure, picking off morsels wherever they appeared, all to the grim satisfaction of their eldritch masters.

It was a massacre, the humans were a flesh feast for the cold-blooded saurian monsters.

High above, the forest was an ocean of fire. Leaves of red and ochre filled the swollen canopy like veins of blood rippling on water. Hunting pterosaurs were visible darting through the unseen fissures in the solid orange sea.

A voice echoed in the darkness of a ship’s belly.

‘They have engaged the Army vanguard, my lord.’

A large figure near the back of the hold breathed in the scent of ash and cinder. Somewhere behind him, the last embers of a ritual fire were slowly fading. Brazier-flame lit his eyes as he looked up. In the gloom, he appeared as scaled and saurian as the monsters in the jungle below.

Abyssal deep, his reply was emphatic.

‘Send in the Legion.’

A heavy engine throb forced its way into the jungle. Below, where the chaos played out and the reaping of human life went unabated, a few surviving Phaerians looked up. As if by some unseen hand, the canopy parted to reveal the slab-sided base of a gunship. Its boarding ramp was down and the darkness within the Stormbird’s belly lit up with a host of fire-red lenses as its occupants concluded their oaths of moment.

The first of the warriors hit the ground with a thunderous boom. Chain-blade whirring, the giant in forest-green levelled his bolt pistol.

‘Rally! For the freedom of humanity and the glory of Terra!’

Like thunderbolts striking the earth, he was joined by others, armour-clad crusaders bearing the symbol of the snarling drake on their shoulder guards.

We are fire-born.

They roared as one.

‘Vulkan!’

He had fought the eldar before, though not like this. Attached to the 154th Expeditionary Fleet, he’d been charged with fighting off piratical raiders, an entirely different alien breed to the jungle-dwellers. They had been succubus horrors, draped in leather and festooned with charnel blades. Emerging from space as if an autonomous part of the void had detached itself from the whole, the raiders had gutted two frigates before the XVIII Legion intervened and repelled them. Nocturneans called them ‘dusk-wraiths’. They were phantoms, soul-thieves, and he hated them with all the ingrained cultural memory of his people.

Heka’tan had not crossed blades with the dragon-riders before this battle. These forest-bound aliens were not as technologically advanced as their cousins but they were still eldar. And they were fast.

‘Cutting left.’ The warning vocalised through his squad’s comm-feed also displayed as an icon in his retinal lens. His bolt pistol was still scanning, spitting out semi-auto at an enemy so fleet of foot his targeter couldn’t keep up. Foliage split apart under the barrage.

‘Burst fire.’

The legionaries stopped aiming and focussed on areas instead. A furious combined salvo brought down the rider and three of its kindred.

Heka’tan saw Brother Kaitar kneel and daub a finger of ash down his shoulder guard from the smouldering remains of one of the fires littering the clearing.

‘Unto the anvil, captain.’

Heka’tan smiled behind his faceplate and gave Kaitar a curt salute. He opened up the company-band feed.

‘All of the Fourteenth. Advance.’

Multiple Stormbirds had broken through the forest canopy, bringing warriors of the XVIII Legion to relieve the beleaguered Army. They consolidated quickly and methodically, Vulkan’s sons as exacting as their father when it came to warmaking.

Several squads from Heka’tan’s company came together and a wall of bolter fire lit up the jungle, chasing back the darkness and chewing up trees into kindling. The eldar vanguard withered before it. Pterosaurs took flight, spearing through gaps in the leaf canopy, calling out vengeance. A blockade of stegosaurs emerged from behind a fleeing screen of raptor riders in an attempt to impede the legionaries.

With clipped battle-sign, Heka’tan brought up a division of heavies.

Capacitors powered from a soft drone to a hard thrum as the conversion beamers reached fire-ready status. A crackling foom rushed from the aiming nozzles as the energy weapons sliced foliage apart to detonate with purpose against the stegosaurs. An explosion engulfed the beasts, leaving nothing behind but wet bone chunks.

Two fingers snapping forwards in a quick chop-chop motion brought up the bolters again. Heka’tan led the line, holstering his pistol as the Salamanders took control of the battlefield. Slowly, the resolve of the Army units was returning. The appearance of the Legiones Astartes had emboldened them as the Salamanders marched implacably through the shaken Phaerians.

Heka’tan glowered at an Army overseer who was trying to restore order in his platoon.

‘Bring your men with me, soldier.’

The overseer gave a sharp salute at the captain. ‘For the glory of Terra and the Emperor!’ He turned to bellow at his men with greater vigour. Across the jungle expanse, the Salamanders were wrangling control of the Army units and clearing a path. With the Legion as a spear-point, the Army would move behind them in support.

Despite the death of the stegosaurs and the multiple defeats being inflicted across the two-kilometre stretch of jungle where the Salamanders had touched down, the eldar were tenacious. From the backs of their lizard-steeds, riders put up a whickering salvo of rifle fire. Pterosaurs executed lightning attacks on the legionaries until they’d lost too many to the Salamanders bolters. A baying stegosaur stomped defiantly until a missile burst tore it open. As the beast died, it rolled over and crushed a pair of raptor riders.

Against the Legiones Astartes, the hit and run tactics of the eldar were blunted.

As the Salamanders advanced, the jungle ahead of them began to change. Branches entwined together, leaves and vines thickened to form a union. Within minutes an arboreal impasse had grown in front of the legionaries. Through the retinal lenses of his battle-helm, Heka’tan could still detect multiple body traces from the enemy where they waited in the gloom. The faster-moving elements of the eldar force were already circling again. Raptor packs bounded across his peripheral vision in a colourful heat blur while pterosaur kindreds found perches in the highest trees from where they could launch an ambush.

The icon of Fifth-Sergeant Bannon flashed up alongside targeting data on Heka’tan’s left retinal lens as the captain opened up a channel.

‘Hell and flame, brother.’

An affirmation symbol flashed once before the entire Salamanders front line withdrew and fell back to suppressing fire protocols.

The Army overseer, whose platoon was joined to Heka’tan’s squad, took this as a cue to drive the rallied Phaerians forward, until the legionary stopped him.

‘Not yet,’ he said, holding the human back.

‘We are ready to die for the Emperor’s glory, my liege!’

‘And so you shall, human, but step forward now and your death will serve no cause at all.’ Heka’tan gestured with his chainsword at movement within the Salamanders ranks.

Sergeant Bannon brought six flamer squads to the front of the line.

‘Hell and flame!’

His cry was answered by a pulsating wave of superheated promethium. The jungle shrivelled in the conflagration. On the flanks, incendiaries went up where the circling raptors made contact with the chains of frag grenades laid by Salamanders Scouts operating unseen at the fringes of the battle zone.

Drop-ships filled the sky now, the flames savaging the jungle reflected on their metallic underbellies. Blackened tree stumps and crisped plant-life broke apart in the downdrafts from the Stormbirds’ descent thrusters. Ash laced the breeze. Everything burned.

Heka’tan’s gaze was drawn skywards as the firestorm raged. One ship, apart from the others, had yet to disgorge those within its hold.

‘Father is not joining us.’

Gravius had noticed the primarch’s absence too.

Heka’tan’s fellow brother-captain was close enough to see him eyeing the smoke-wreathed heavens. His Fifth Company was advancing alongside. Over four hundred Legiones Astartes to tame a simple stretch of jungle – the word ‘overkill’ sprang to mind.

Heka’tan replied on a closed channel. ‘He’ll come soon, Gravius,’ he said. ‘When he’s needed.’

But the lonely Stormbird’s ramp stayed shut.

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A Black Library Publication

Promethean Sun first published in 2011.
Scorched Earth first published in 2013.
‘Artefacts’ first published in Sedition’s Gate in 2011.
‘Immortal Duty’ first published in Meduson in 2015.
Sons of the Forge first published in 2016.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Neil Roberts
Internal illustrations by Neil Roberts and Evan Shipard.

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ISBN: 978-1-78572-964-5

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