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Eidolon: The Auric Hammer – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

sons of the phoenix

In the days before their illumination, it had been taken as a certainty by the warriors who waged the Great Crusade that ships could not be haunted by spirits. Not truly. The Mechanicum preached of it, of course, and void sailors kept their own atrophied superstitions, but to the warriors-elect of the Legiones Astartes, to the peerless brotherhood of the III Legion, such things were laughable myths from a bygone age.

Now, through the corridors of the Wage of Sin, madness stalked.

The transit from Ullanor had not been easy or without incident. The ships of the fleet had grown insular and febrile, their hulls rippling like tormented flesh. Suicides, already common amongst the mortal herd, had become endemic. The warriors of the III, beyond such mortal weakness, were restless and distant – haunted by whatever force moved through the great vessel like a predator king, determined to find and seize its heart.

Haunted. The thought itself seemed anathema. Yet there were ghosts in the machines, knifing through the ether-streaked void to prey upon the ships of the flotilla. The impossible and the unthinkable had become all too common. The time of their naivety in the face of the galaxy’s true nature was long behind them. It had changed around them, almost without them being aware of it.

Time, Lord Commander Primus Eidolon reflected, had changed so many things.

He was not the same being who had set out upon the Great Crusade’s vulgar path of conquest. Though he had passed through the trials to make him a child of the Legion, a true son of the Phoenix, it was the years of the new war that had altered him in the most fundamental of ways.

Eidolon had been beautiful once, sharing in the genetic splendour passed down from his primarch. It was a supreme irony, then, that Fulgrim himself had robbed him of it. The scar across Eidolon’s throat had healed badly, a wound inflicted as much upon his soul as on his flesh. Even as his neck pulsed with the sonic alterations conferred by the Chief Apothecary, the scar remained resolutely unbending. It flexed and constricted with every fitful motion, restricting the lord commander’s full range of motion. His skin was bloodlessly pale, his eyes now cataracted and rheumy. His hair fell down one side of his head, lank and wilted like dead plant growth.

Yes, he had been beautiful, once… but that had been long ago and taken at a demigod’s whim.

Fitting, is it not? Jealousy was always one of your many flaws, father.

Eidolon bit away the thought. It was unbecoming, both of him and of Fulgrim. The daemonic presence of the Primarch Ascendant, the Phoenix-in-his-Apotheosis, lingered amidst the corridors of his ship. In the aftermath of Ullanor’s bleak council, it would not do to tempt Fulgrim’s attentions.

Not when there were other matters clawing at Eidolon’s mind. Stalked and tormented as he was. Haunted, he thought again.

Something cooed and whispered at his ear, and he leant his head back, drumming it against the command throne as though pain could dismiss the threat. It lolled this way and that with every pulse of his throat, like a child’s marionette, overbalanced and caricatured. Whatever drifted about him, coiling and writhing just beneath reality’s skin, was close enough to touch him. He was braced to feel claws tease his skin in lines of fire, for fangs to close around his throat.

After so long being hunted… perhaps the culmination would be nothing short of a delight. Eidolon yearned to savour the experience.

Around him, the command bridge of the Wage of Sin rose in tarnished splendour. Like its master it had once been a beautiful thing; now it was exalted, transformed by the III Legion’s unleashed appetites. Banners of human skin fluttered from the iron ribs of its ceiling, and mirrors glimmered in broken majesty from the corners of the room, casting forth reflections that should not exist – images which moved too slowly, or too quickly, or watched their subjects when they were not looking. Sometimes Eidolon would catch a shattered image’s eye as it leered and laughed at him with his own face. An incarnate mockery. Eidolon could have sworn he’d heard derision drifting about him as the shattered reflection judged and assessed him. He shook himself, banished the memory, and rolled his shoulders.

‘Status report,’ he rumbled, rising from his command throne. Harvested bone glistened wetly along its edges, shimmering with an internal light that caught on the lines of Eidolon’s corroded, ruined armour.

His hand contracted again, reaching across to the arm of his throne, stroking the haft of the thunder hammer that reclined there. Glory Aeterna was a weapon of consummate craft, one he had wielded with skill and devotion ever since the primarch had graced him with it. He turned from it and spoke to the empty air.

‘Now we know our purpose,’ he breathed. ‘At last the galaxy will understand as we have been made to.’ He blinked, milky eyes darting with the sudden need for stimulus. ‘Status report!’ he called again. He was not sure whether he had slipped so deeply into his reverie that he had missed the report or whether those creatures still at their posts had simply ignored him, lost to their own mania.

Either way, it was an inexcusable lapse for someone of his position.

‘Fleet disposition holds, esteemed lord,’ crooned what passed for the vessel’s master of auspex. The androgynous thing had no eyes, only sutured sockets where they had once rested. A web of cables were wired and screwed into its back, forcing sensor data into its nervous system in an unceasing wave of cognitive feedback and neural overload. The creature mewled and writhed, caught in the ecstasy of complete surrender to excess and duty. Somewhere, behind the chorus of muted pleasure, Eidolon could hear someone sniggering. ‘Responses from the Sublime Blade and the Broken Monarch, the Dwell Eternal and His Beauty Manifest. The auxiliary transport ships are in transit as well. The disposition of the Third Millennial holds true, my lord.’

The Third Millennial. He smiled. That was the command he had taken for his own, upon the road to Terra. Mere rabble, soon to stand as gods upon the Throneworld’s burning skin.

Such a ripe harvest. They could be so much more. We could–

‘Excellent,’ Eidolon said, forcing himself to ignore the sound of mockery, and reached out to stroke the inlaid jewels along one osseus arm of his throne, the gems winking in the garish lights. Ruby and emerald, amber and sapphire. Systems purred in response to his manipulations, seeking communion with the other vessels of the war flotilla, even through the warp’s tides. Signals arrays reached out across the immaterial madness between his vessel and those of his peers, dancing between the ships bound for the Sol System. One by one the warriors of the III began to manifest, delicate patterns of hololithic light riven through with the contradictory static of the warp’s malign tides.

‘Ah, Eidolon,’ the image of Julius Kaesoron hissed with curdled mirth. ‘The closer we draw to the Throneworld, the more insufferable you become.’ It shuddered with laughter and the warped visage of the First Captain loomed forward. ‘Still playing at lordship! The Phoenician has returned to us and the Legion is gathered. What do you gain by trying to rest your hand at the tiller?’

‘Someone has to make sure you don’t plunge your vessels into a star on a whim, Julius,’ Eidolon gurgled back. ‘Let us not forget that I outrank you. Herding you and yours falls to me because I have earned my place. I have been trusted by our errant father.’ He paused, hunching forward so that he was eye to eye with the rendition of the Favoured Son. ‘Who was the first to join him at Ullanor?’ he scoffed.

‘You were quick to come to heel, true enough. Others had sought him while you dallied elsewhere. Hunting the Scars in futility, wasn’t it? Before you bowed and scraped for Mortarion.’ Kaesoron tittered and the image shook, light twisting around his ruined features. ‘With such diverse interests, it’s a wonder you ever came this far. I imagined that you and the forces you commanded would have idled, waiting, lost to your own desires rather than the masters we serve. Our new gods, the primarch, and the Warmaster.’

‘It is only fair that you see your own flaws and failings reflected in me, Julius,’ Eidolon said. He shook his head and his lank hair fluttered gently, all lustre robbed by his rebirth. ‘I have been fighting the Warmaster’s battles. I sought to cage our enemies and break them. I remember what it means to serve the cause.’

‘Always on your own terms.’

‘There can be no other terms but mine.’ Eidolon gestured, not to the hololith but past it.

Three kneeling figures moved in a single motion at his encouragement, rising to their feet and regarding their master with a mixture of emotions. Envy warred with respect. Fear was choked down by the pretence of pride. It bled from them in a potent mix, mirrored in every movement they made, in their stances, in the subtle purring of their armour.

Captain Malakris wore his ruination like a cloak of glory. He had scoured his armour clean of the purple and gold of the Emperor’s Children and replaced it with a wild array of colours. Some of the shades that glistened upon his plate had no human name, having been culled from the warp itself. He had anointed himself with the blood of daemons – taken in combat or given willingly in esoteric pacts and unholy oaths – till he seemed to glow with the immaterium’s fickle light. Tiny rows of needle teeth had begun to push themselves from the edges of his pauldrons, undoubtedly terminating as bony barbs within the armour itself, to scrape and cut at Malakris’ flesh with every movement. His gauntlets were a set of matched lightning claws, once artfully rendered, now hooked like the talons of some exaggerated raptor. His helmet, long since brazenly fashioned into the screaming rictus of a bird of prey, was mag-locked at his hip, revealing his remade face.

The once rakish features of the warrior had been twisted like melting wax. Jewelled studs were driven bone-deep into his skull, and rings adorned the folds and flaps of warped and distended skin. In places along the scalp, it seemed that Malakris had intentionally flayed his skin and muscle away, and ivory glistened wetly in the harsh lights of the bridge.

By contrast Vocipheron maintained the lean, even elegant, lines of a blademaster of the III Legion. His armour had come through the early battles of the war with little desecration, save where the wounds had been patched with gold. The filled cracks sprawled like lustrous rivers across the perfect purple of his battle plate. Twin sabres were belted at his hips, their edges finely polished and the metal expertly maintained. They had been forged by Vocipheron’s own hands, to the fascination and delight of the Legion’s Techmarines. He wore his helmet, hiding the consummate warrior’s sharp features and golden hair. Where Malakris was ruin and flux given form, Vocipheron held firm against the tides of excessive alteration. That he endured amidst such a brotherhood, a true paragon of the old Palatine Blades now cast into a pit of warrior-sybarites, spoke of his dedication and his self-control.

Eidolon almost envied him his surety.

Last of all was Til Plegua of the Kakophoni. The Ruin-singer was the zenith, the culmination, singularly everything that Malakris aspired to and Vocipheron reviled. His eyes had been pinned open, sutures biting into the flesh of one side of his face and the bone of the other. Til Plegua had, at the whim of the gods and through the transformative delight of the Maraviglia, flensed away the meat from the right side of his face, leaving a morbid rictus of grinning bone and perpetually tormented nerve-mesh, scrimshawed with strange symbols and intricate scenes of debauchery.

His armour was festooned with sonic amplifiers and vox-emitters, bolted and welded into the distended fabric of the plate. A myriad of insane colours swam between the mechanisms, so that he seemed more a madman’s painting come to life than a warrior of the Emperor’s Children. His throat pulsed and thrummed in mimicry of Eidolon’s own sonic gifts, and the Lord Commander Primus knew that to hear Til speak was to court madness. Transcendent melodies still swam in his speech, his every utterance little more than a reflection of some vaster and more glorious work.

‘My champions stand ready for the task,’ Eidolon said simply, gesturing again, down past Kaesoron’s smirking horror. ‘I have taken the warriors of the Third Millennial as my own, and they have proven themselves to be admirable servants and fine company.’ He hesitated, forcing a grin onto his twisted features. ‘For the most part.’

‘You never were a great judge of character, were you?’ Kaesoron snorted as he spoke, and the hololith shimmered and sparked again. Between the flickers of projected light, something dwelt. Eidolon saw it in fractured moments, caught like an insect in amber, leering back at him with features that gave even him pause.

Daemon.

The thought rippled across his mind. He was no longer listening to Kaesoron’s jibes and vainglorious boasts. There was only the presence which lurked behind and beyond his words. Fangs glistened wetly, set in a face wracked by delirious pleasure-pain. For a fleeting moment, Eidolon thought he saw an echo of the Phoenician in the thing’s mania, but it was gone a second later. It held no true form. The liminal stuff of its being flowed before writhing in limitless mockery.

Brother…

The voice whispered into Eidolon’s skull. Pain throbbed dully through his cranium, and he leant back, letting the flesh catch on the bone spurs of his throne. He thudded his skull against the metal and breathed out.

Kindred…

The thing whispered again, its every word dancing with revelation and promise. Eidolon knew that if he lowered his guard but a little then the presence would find purchase, slither in, hollow him out.

Daemons were nothing but dust and dreams, poisoned promises.

‘Brother?’ Kaesoron’s voice had returned now. The First Captain spared Eidolon a withering look before he chuckled bleakly. ‘You do not look well, Lord Commander Primus. Perhaps you should let your tame physicians tend to your maladies, eh?’ The image shuddered once more and Kaesoron looked away, turning his maddened gaze to the side and nodding. ‘When next we speak, it shall be as we return home, guided by our father’s hand. Then the feast can begin in earnest. I hope to see you upon the field, lord commander. It would be… truly exquisite to fight with you once again.’

Eidolon merely nodded, teeth gritted. ‘As I’m sure it would be to fight at your side, Favoured Son.’ He forced his grimace to become a grin. ‘Terra shall be the crucible and the culmination. There we shall be as we were always intended to be.’

Eidolon’s mind roiled with the potential of what was to come. Terra itself, the Throneworld laid bare and yearning to their attentions. A populace to be made sport of and old rivals to be cast down. After Terra there would be time to build, for Fabius to experiment, for the Legion to truly blossom, and for his own ascent to become complete. He was the Lord Commander Primus. There would be a place for him in the new Imperium… Yet first that final barricade had to be surmounted.

The Palace had to be claimed and made ready, just as the thrones of the gods waited beyond the veil.

‘Soon all other enmities shall be set aside,’ Kaesoron intoned. The hololith flickered again and the ship shuddered as though in baleful sympathy. ‘The time comes when you must at last–’

‘Join us,’ the daemon breathed in place of the First Captain. It looked at Eidolon with milky eyes, cataracted and yet bright with immaterial fire. In that perfect moment, suspended before the dying image of Julius Kaesoron, it raised one clawed hand as though conducting a symphony, toying with the air to the tune of music only it could hear.

Then the ship was shaking and screaming, and all was reduced to fire and the laughter of those who dwelt beyond.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2024.
This eBook edition published in 2024 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mauro Belfiore.

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