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Eater of Dreams – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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EATER OF DREAMS

By Marc Collins

The world was crowned in light, and Fel Zharost despised it.

After so long in the absolute darkness beneath Albia, he had grown accustomed to a life in the shadows – forever shunning even the most meagre of illumination. Now he stood at the pinnacle of such conceits, surrounded by the refracted radiance of marble and gold, knowing nothing but the most profound disconnect from it.

The light had grown more hateful than the darkness and shared none of its honesty. Yet he had no choice but to be led into the heart of it. He noted details as he passed. Fleeting realisations of how desperate matters had grown. Truly, the mind of the grey-armoured warrior who had hunted him had not contained all the petty compromises which now stalked the Imperium. Here and there, glimpsed through armaglass windows or from narrow passageways between crenellations, he had seen the violations forced upon the Palace. The grey gunmetal of weapons platforms, the spires of towers replaced by the vanes of void shield generators. Slowly, deliberately, the grandeur and gilt had been stripped away to be replaced by utilitarian defence. A dream being devoured by degrees.

The Palace was no longer a place of rule, but one of practical defiance.

Is this why it has come to this? Are they so desperate that they would drag vagabond sons and their proscribed gifts from self-made graves?

The thought trembled across his mind. Fel Zharost looked upon Terra’s new works and scented the fear that had raised them. Despair blanketed the world like a shroud, choking all beneath the unremitting weight of it.

‘Where are you taking me?’ he asked his captor. The grey warrior did not answer. He did not even look back. He had barely uttered a word on the long ascent into Albia, or the sub-orbital flight which had followed. Zharost bit back the urge to skirt the warrior’s mind again. He had seen enough. If there were to be more revelations then they would not be plucked from the ether – they would come to him from knowing lips, laced with lies, and heavy with import.

They passed beneath archways of cold iron and through gates which bristled with servitor-controlled sentry guns, deeper into the undervaults of the Palace. There was no gold now; only the grey stone and the robed adepts who moved through the warrens like a hive’s drones, cloaked in the same shades. When the adepts noticed the grey-armoured figure and the filthy rag-wreathed charge he shepherded, they turned their gaze away in the knowledge that this was not for their eyes.

Zharost was led through a great pair of doors, iron inlaid with gold, and they passed into a long undercroft. Low lumens burned in their alcoves, casting pale light along the marbled walls. Zharost’s breath caught in his throat as he beheld the walls. They bore none of the Palace’s ostentatious finery, but instead had been delicately painted. There were ten murals on each side of the chamber, though two had been covered by thick black tarps – shrouded as if in mourning. As they passed by each of the murals, Zharost was able to pick out details. Renditions of beings beyond mortal ken, clad in armour and raised as figures of martial triumph. Some were clad in gold where others were ensconced in iron. Each of them stared out across the room to regard a fellow sibling.

The primarchs, honoured and lauded, as crisp and pristine as any propagandist’s pict.

His guide stopped just short of halfway down the long processional and then turned to walk back to the door. Zharost watched him go before taking in his surroundings. The low light suited him and allowed his senses to adjust. He gazed up at the proud, sweeping form of the Ravenlord, black armour glimmering with artist’s lacquer, demonstrating a tremendous sense of motion – like the very shadows of the chamber coaxed into movement by the rendered presence. He knew, suddenly and intrinsically, what he would see if he turned and viewed Corax’s opposite. He closed his eyes, willing himself not to turn.

‘It is a hard thing to face, is it not? The sins of the father.’

A voice cut across the gloom and Zharost turned to face it. A shrunken figure stalked from the shadows, having stood so still that even Zharost’s senses – material and supernal – had slipped over him. The figure’s quiet demeanour pulsed with suppressed power, and the former Chief Librarian understood why he had not been aware of his presence.

Malcador the Sigillite, First Lord of Terra, was a thing wrought from strength and subtlety. Even his wizened features betrayed no weakness, merely a resignation. Whatever he had been studying at the far end of the chamber lingered about him, coiling like etheric smoke.

‘Do not speak,’ Malcador intoned. He gestured with one delicate hand and his staff of office snapped from where it had leant against a silver column. The moment Malcador’s fingers closed about its haft, the eagle that surmounted it blazed with sudden light and psychic fire. Zharost winced. His eyes ached. His sharpened teeth throbbed in his gums. Sweat beaded his bare scalp and his breathing came in short, sharp bursts as the unleashed psykana saturated the chamber. ‘Merely… look. Observe, and understand.’

Zharost could barely even struggle as he turned, his body moving to another’s will. He tried to force his eyes closed, but the sheer psychic exertion held them open. He stood, ramrod straight, forced to take in the sullied grandeur of the portrait.

There had been few remembrancers amongst the fleets of the VIII Legion and so what little art had returned to the Imperium’s bosom had been abstract and haunted. This rendition was no different. Even the fawning adoration of mortal hands could only do so much to soften the ghoulish, drawn features of the Night Haunter. The spill of ebony hair, the corpse-pallor of his skin, the eyes the black of deep-ocean predators. Through it all bled the persistent hunger: for vengeance, for vindication, to be lauded in his justified righteousness.

Zharost remembered in that moment what it had been like to see Konrad Curze for the first time. Amongst the Legions only the War Hounds, now the Eaters of Worlds, must have known such disappointment. A broken being, ruling over a world of charnel compliance.

‘He was never my father,’ Zharost breathed. ‘Not truly. Terra was my mother and Albia’s lowest depths were my teacher, but if I had any true father then it was the night – not the thing that haunted it.’

‘We forget, to our cost, that these weapons we cast out into the void are also men,’ Malcador allowed, carefully. The Sigillite’s psychic pressure faded, and Zharost almost stumbled forward as he found himself once again in control of his limbs. Even without his armour Zharost seemed to dwarf the old man, yet the strength that burned beneath that paper-thin skin was enough to cow the warrior. ‘Yet you are a weapon that chose disuse and atrophy rather than unjust use.’

‘There was no longer any justice in it.’ Zharost shook his head in disgust. ‘If there ever was. My war was not their war. Our ways were never theirs. We were dredged up from nothing, with only the iron will of Albia in our veins. They defied Him, and for it they were rewarded – how many Legions lay claim to Albia’s proud sons? From the ironclad guilds and the smog-choked cities, aye, and from the depths. From the darkness. Each weapon moulded by the smelter’s cruelty found its way to the stars, one way or another, and knew its purpose.’

‘Your purpose…’ Malcador paused and collected himself. The Sigillite’s gaze drifted past Zharost and up to regard again the rendered visage of the Night Haunter. ‘Your purpose was ever known to us. Sanction is a blade, black shrouded and well blooded. The galaxy cannot be won by lofty goals alone. There had to be terror behind the gold, else the stars would never have been tamed.’ He sighed. ‘There were monsters in the darkness and so we required monsters of our own – not merely knights and lords, but beasts in the shape of men.’

‘Wolves and hounds, and the children of night.’

‘Just so.’ Malcador seized upon that thought and leant in conspiratorially. ‘You understand, as I hoped you would. We have always known where you were, Fel Zharost. Though your exile was a silent affair, and the Eighth had taken themselves into their seclusion by then… we knew. We were content to leave you to your self-decided repose. But the galaxy has changed. It has turned upside down, caught fire, and fallen headlong into the shadow. In such times loyalty is as smoke. We turn instead to weapons whose mettle is known and whose strength of character has been tested.’

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A Black Library Publication

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

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-721-3

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