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Celestine: Revelation – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Celestine: Revelation

By: Andy Clark

Machoria burned. The heat of its flames beat against her back. Blood-stink was in her nostrils, the cries of the fearful and wounded in her ears. Ash skirled around her on furnace winds. Celestine flexed her knuckles about the grip of the Ardent Blade. She planted her feet more firmly upon the roadway that led from the city gates and willed away the pain of her wounds.

‘Emperor, give me strength,’ she murmured, drawing comfort from the familiar words. The God-Emperor was always with her. In every war cry, every swing of her blade and every step she took. They had a pact, she and He.

While it endured, so too did that bond.

Still, His presence was hard to feel in this place. Warp fires swallowed the sky all the way to where the Khori Mountains rose like jagged horns on the horizon. Closer to hand, what had once been hydroponic fields had been reduced to blackened bedrock. The crops had been annihilated by the enemy’s bombardment, the waters turned to a steam that mingled with the blood-haze in the air. Corpses rose in tangled mounds before the walls. Some were the bodies of agri-labourers unfortunate enough to be caught outside the gates before they shut. Those were many days old now, barely more than bone. Others, fresher, had been soldiers of the Astra Militarum, brave men and women of the Coskan Minotaurs and the Sarmathian 86th.

All martyrs to the Emperor’s glory, she thought. All alike in death.

Their living comrades occupied trench lines that stretched along the foot of the walls to Celestine’s right and left. Others manned the Machorian battlements, doing their best to keep the city’s guns firing, even as flames licked up from the buildings below. They traded fire with the enemy’s artillery, hurling ordnance towards the foothills of the Khori range. Relentless volleys screamed back at them.

Horns brayed from within the mists. The sound was brazen, a ferocious roar that swelled until Celestine swore her bones vibrated. It droned on and on until she feared it must drive the Imperial soldiery mad.

At last, the horns faded. As they did, the panicked voices of Coskans and Sarmathians became audible from the trenches.

‘Steady, sons and daughters of Sarmathia, steady!’

‘They come again!’

‘No, please, no. Emperor preserve us.’

Gunshots rang out as regimental commissars did their duty.

Celestine wished her Sisters still stood by her side. All had fallen, every one of the Mission whose presence had anchored the Machorian garrison’s faith. Even her Geminae Superia were lost, their deaths more painful to Celestine than any physical wound. The enemy had come again and again, had focused their hate upon the Battle Sisters and spent countless lives to see them fall. Now Celestine was alone amidst the masses, a figurehead to those who remained but as separate from them as a lonely mountaintop was from the ocean floor. In divinity lay isolation.

The beasts come to finish me, and if I fall then all is lost.

She could see them now, insubstantial figures charging through the mists. Their war cries echoed as though across an impossible gulf. Yet their eyes shone fire-bright, hundreds of coals burning through the veil as the foe drew closer.

Daemons.

Celestine saw many-legged fleshmetal monsters lumbering through the enemy ranks, things whose maws blazed like furnaces. Cavalry came on like an avalanche of brass while there, in the centre of the line, strode a towering abomination clad in spiked brass armour. It bore an axe taller than Celestine in each fist. Eight horns crowned the monster’s helm. Braziers blazed atop its shoulders, skulls blackening amidst their flames.

‘Arnokh,’ Celestine growled. Then, in a calculated gesture of contempt, she turned her back upon the advancing horrors. She swept her gaze instead across the soldiers cowering in their trenches and raised her voice to a shout.

‘Soldiers of the Imperium. Men and women of the Emperor’s realm. Our enemies come to test us yet again.’

Servo-skulls hovered low, recording her address with auto-receptors and transmitting it to the thousands of Imperial soldiers still clinging to this city by their fingernails. Celestine felt their desperate need as a weight upon her soul, trying to drag her to her knees.

‘They have assailed us time and again. They have thrown at us all their hate! All their rage! But have we buckled before them? No!’

She could sense the foe getting nearer with every heartbeat, their menace swelling at her back, the ground vibrating beneath her feet.

‘We will never give way to these abominations. Why? Because they are filth, dredged from the darkness to test our faith, and that faith is strong!’

Celestine brandished the Ardent Blade high so that it gleamed like a star in the firelight. Soldiers gripped their lasguns tighter at that sight, stood taller, or so she hoped.

‘The God-Emperor is with us this day! His will is wrought in me, and I shall lead you to victory! Now fight, sons and daughters of the Imperium! Fight with me, and win!’

Celestine spun to face the foe’s onslaught. As she did so, she tried to believe her own words. Yet even as the guns of the Imperial Guard sang their hymn of death, even as daemons were struck down to tatter away in bursts of embers, she could not help but doubt.

The abominations are legion, and our soldiers so weary, she thought. Emperor, I am so weary.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Kevin Chin.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-316-1

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