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Ephrael Stern: The Heretic Saint – Extract

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I

WOUNDS

Ephrael Stern soared over a breaking landscape. Tremors shattered the crust, gathering strength as if in anger at her arrival. The abominations knew she was coming for them, and at their command the volcanic chain had erupted. Crevasses opened, swallowing vaults and mausoleums; a wall of lava raced outward, transforming the surface of Parastas, creating a plateau miles high, burying all trace of the monuments that had been there. It pained her to think of the destruction this struggle was bringing to the sacred memorials of the Imperium. It was only small consolation that they had been tainted by the worldwide sweep of corruption she had found on her arrival.

Even amongst this destruction, she had faith the shrine of Saint Aphrania would still be standing. It was deep behind the enemy lines, deep within the heart of the Parastas incursion. But it was on the highest peak. It was the holiest site on the desecrated shrine world. It would have resisted.

She had faith.

She had faith.

The heat from below grew, spiking until the auto-senses of her armour strobed with warning runes. Stern shaped psychic lightning into a protective shell around her, and she flew on, closer and closer to the blinding fire and the colossal roaring where once there had been mountains. She passed into the heart of the destruction. The land beneath her screamed. It was a roiling cauldron of eruptions. Enormous columns split away from the mountainsides and tumbled, turning molten, into the magma. The roar of the destruction was a fury that came in waves, yet never seemed to subside. The blood of the world boiled.

As she reached the furnace, the daemons came for her. Through burning air, they streaked her way, screaming their fury, their material forms torn and ragged. The abominations of different aspects of the Dark Gods charged together. The injuries to the materium had been so large on Parastas that daemons of every description had poured over the world like disparate swarms of insects. A plague united in their hatred of a single enemy.

A cloud of crimson-hued furies, barely sentient embodiments of wrath, came at her left, a storm within a storm. Attacking her right was a herald of Tzeentch, riding a chariot pulled by winged, howling screamers. The daemon of change, its flesh the deep pink of exposed muscle, held the reins of the chariot with one hand, while with two more arms it conjured the power of the warp, preparing to cast Stern into a sorcerous abyss.

She clenched her fists tight, the power building around her. She called on the fury of the warp, shaping it with the purity of faith. Then she turned, diving directly at the herald, unleashing her fury.

‘Die, abomination,’ she roared. ‘In the God-Emperor’s name, die.’

A torrent of light, blistering to the soul, blasted into the daemon. It howled in pain, and its spell exploded. Uncontrolled sorcery enveloped it and its abhorrent steeds. The chariot began to tumble, speed bleeding away, and then a geyser of lava fountained up, swallowing the abominations. They vanished in a conflagration of molten rock and blinding warp explosions.

The furies were caught by the edge of Stern’s firestorm. Wings sheared away and daemons spiralled down into the eruptions below. The others swung around, the swarm trying to get at her from behind. She turned, her righteous anger far from sated. Stretching out her arms, holy light leapt from her fists and lightning crackled from her eyes as a nimbus of shattering force surrounded her, and then launched itself forward. The furies screamed, their wrath turning to uncomprehending pain, until they fell as ash, and the ash disintegrated into scarlet sparks of warp-stuff.

Stern flew on, faster now, rushing with the momentum of combat. She weaved around the largest eruptions. Her shell preserved her when she passed through the magmatic blasts she could not avoid. She streaked through a world wracked with convulsions. Nothing was solid. Mountains were sinking. This portion of Parastas had returned to the moments of the planet’s shrieking birth.

This is your doing, an insidious voice whispered within her head. You called this destruction upon this world. This is what the abominations will do to stop you.

‘This is judgement,’ Stern replied out loud, her voice vibrating with power. ‘Parastas has fallen. Its people turned from the Emperor. Now it pays for its apostasy.’

While all else succumbed, the Shrine of Saint Aphrania would not. That would still be standing. It had to be.

And it was.

The Mountain of Faith Eternal loomed ahead. Deep in the volcanic chain, it rumbled with tremors, but had not yet erupted. As she drew closer, she saw rockslides cascading down its flanks. The ocean of lava had risen to almost a third of its height. Wreathed in smoke and ash, it still towered over every other landmark.

On its rounded peak, the Shrine of Saint Aphrania weathered the cataclysm. It was a squat, brooding structure, its massive walls surrounding the dome that concealed the tomb and reliquary. The saint who slept within had been a visionary and a conqueror, and her monument was even more single-minded in its fortification than the Sepulchre of Iron Sleep. That monument, to the west of the volcanoes, was where Stern had been forced to establish her base, and where she had gathered the relics she had rescued from destruction. The Shrine of Saint Aphrania was ten times stronger. It was designed to hold off a siege that would never come, and protected no one but the dead.

Only the siege had come. The invaders clustered along its ramparts, their obscene forms seeming to dance in the hurricane winds of fire and cinder. The abominations had taken the fortress. The holy relic she sought was their hostage. And squatting astride the dome was the worst of the monsters to have come to Parastas. It was a bloated, suppurating, corpulent mass. Internal organs bulged outward from the huge lesions in its gut. It carried a gigantic, rotten, rusting bell in one hand, and a blackened axe, the blade pitted and oozing, in the other. It greeted Stern’s arrival by rearing up, flames sliding off its viscous flesh, and spreading its arms in welcome.

‘Come to me, thrice-born! Let the rulers of two fortresses meet! Come, and receive the gifts of a present, generous god.’

The daemon had a name, and Stern knew it. She knew it because of the seven hundred within her, the seven hundred Sisters and their knowledge. Because they had fought so long and learned so much of the Ruinous Powers before they had fallen, she knew the daemon too. This was a Great Unclean One, and his name was Thylissix, the One Who Gnaws. He was the spreader of cancers, the sower of tumours. At his presence, flesh and bone devoured themselves. But Thylissix attacked much more than the body.

‘Accept the embrace of the Grandfather. He will never abandon you!’

Thylissix found special delight in the canker of the soul. He harvested the blisters of doubt, and the oozing pustules of despair. But while Stern knew this daemon, he knew her too. He attacked while there was still a distance between them, seeking to prise open her faith and set the rot loose inside. He offered her an obscene mirror, drawing connections between them, and then presenting a contrast. His god was always with him. His was the god of perpetual giving.

‘You will always be worthy. You will always be rewarded.’

Thylissix shouted with welcome and joy, but Stern heard something quite different behind the daemon’s words. She heard pain. She heard anger.

‘You are desperate, filth!’ Stern shouted back, closing in. ‘You should be!’

The tremors on the Mountain of Faith Eternal intensified. It was stirring to life in order to die. Steam blasted up from opening craters. The walls of the shrine shook and split, hurling daemons down the mountainside and into the cauldron.

Thylissix raised his great bell and swung it. A muffled yet deafening toll resounded over the volcanic chain. Each peal was louder than the eruptions, and sounded like a corpse striking lead. The bell swung, and the ash in the air turned to flies. They battered upon Stern’s shield, buzzing and biting. Each insect was a fragment of doubt, and millions surrounded her. The shield blackened. The light became dirty. Heat and corrosion reached for Stern.

‘Hear the call of the Grandfather! Hear the wonder of his promise!’ the daemon shouted.

His bell tolled and tolled and tolled.

Stern saw nothing but the night of flies. She sensed the arc of her flight altering. Her stomach dropped. She was falling. Tumbling into the waiting, lethal embrace of the Great Unclean One.

‘No,’ she hissed. ‘You will fall to me, abomination. I am the invader now. I am the threat, and you, Thylissix, cannot hide your fear.’

The flies could not touch her. The doubt could not touch her. She had lost the favour of the God-Emperor, but she served Him yet. She always would. He was the Father of Mankind. There could never be a capitulation to the Grandfather of Disease.

Stern summoned the light again. She felt the power of the warp surge through her body, her mind, her spirit. She moulded it with the outrage of faith, then sent it out to burn the One Who Gnaws.

The bell tolled, but the flies vanished, incinerated by the psychic blast. The bell tolled, and the ash-that-was-flies swirled around her, becoming the vortex of a storm. The buzzing horrors could not approach her. They burned when they drew near.

Thylissix raised his terrible axe.

Stern’s excoriating beam hit him in the thorax. The daemon staggered, roaring in pain. The bell dropped from his hand. It bounced against the dome. Where it hit, the rockcrete rotted and turned soft as sponge. A portion of the roof disintegrated. The bell rolled down, struck the wall, rotting it too, and then rolled over the edge of the mountain. It plummeted into the eruptions. When it vanished, its final peal was a shriek.

Thylissix swung the axe. His blow was weakened, his aim off as his other hand clutched the open wound. The side of the blade smashed through Stern’s protective shell. It struck her like a wall and hurled her down the base of the dome. She hit with the force of an artillery shell, punching a crater into the dome and the breath from her lungs. Masonry exploded around her, and her armour thrummed.

Stern screamed in agony, her body now a single mass of pain. Worms crawled over her armour, probing for cracks, probing for weakness, their movements a sinuous questioning. Now? Now? Are you weak here? Do you doubt here?

She gave them her answer. ‘No!’ She took hold of the pain, made it hers and answerable to her alone, and she rose to her feet.

Thylissix howled. The wound in his chest was a huge one, and it was spreading. The daemon’s flesh was black. Instead of putrefaction, it was the black of incineration. There was no joy to be found in the festering of an injury. There was only the pain of dissolution, the agony of a form losing its hold on the materium.

‘You will beg Grandfather Nurgle for the balm of his gifts!’ Thylissix roared. He readied the axe once more.

The mountain shook and the shrine canted suddenly, staggering the One Who Gnaws.

Stern flew upward, away from the rising lava. She was the lightning of faith, and she concentrated the power into the blade of her sword, Sanctity. Thylissix swung his weapon. The attack was weak, foredoomed. Stern struck. Blazing with light, she dragged Sanctity upward, into the wound. Flesh parted. Tumours rolled, burning, down the torso. She flew upward still, slicing into the neck, and into the obscenely soft jaws and skull.

Thylissix screamed, his agony becoming slobbering, broken syllables as the sword cut his tongue in two.

Stern flew higher, faster. She was a meteor now, shooting skyward instead of down, a rising angel.

The daemon fell silent. His head parted. The two halves lolled on opposite sides. The great, hideous body fell. Stern flew above it, then paused, hovering, to see the purging complete. Already disintegrating, Thylissix slumped away from the dome and collapsed on the walls, crushing more daemons beneath him. His mass became a semi-coagulated liquid, his skin its too-weak crust. He flowed over the walls, bringing them down. Stone and abomination became a gelid wave. Lesser daemons struggled, drowning in the eldritch putrefaction. More crevasses opened in the mountain, and the first streams of lava emerged on the peak, omens of the eruption to come. The flow burned the corpse and the abominations trapped within it. Very quickly, the enormous foulness shrank, its essence returning to the dark corners of the warp that had spawned it.

The mountain shook again. Cracks spread over the dome.

Hurry, Stern thought. The shrine had already well rewarded her faith. If she tarried and lost the relic within, the sin would be hers.

She shot down through the gap opened by Thylissix’s bell, the psychic power crackling off her armour bringing light to the interior of the vault. Lesser daemons surrounded the marble tomb in the centre of the floor, and she fell upon them in fury. She hit the ground with an impact of thunder, and a shock wave of incandescent psychic energy exploded from her, flash-burning the horrors where they stood. For a few moments, their carbonised bodies were motionless, echoes of the statues erected by the penitents around the Sepulchre of Iron Sleep. Then they collapsed into blackened dust.

The eerie silence was broken as huge, jagged wedges of stone thrust up through the floor, steam hissing between them. Chunks of the dome and the upper walls fell, smashing to splinters.

Hurry.

The centre of the chamber was still intact, the tomb and its reliquary untouched. But they would not be for long if she did not hurry.

Stern ran towards the tomb, leaping over the chasms opening up in the floor. The dome shook again, and the heat was rising. Angry red light shone from the depths of the mountain. Another tremor was almost strong enough to knock Stern off her feet.

She reached the tomb. Its sanctity was so strong that the upheavals in the chamber faded into the background of Stern’s awareness. She knelt before the memorial of the great saint. The marble tomb depicted Aphrania lying with her hands clasped around her sword, her eyes open as if commanding those who looked upon her to take up her cause for the God-Emperor. Though this was a tomb, no actual remains were here apart from the relic itself. Aphrania had died in combat. That her skull had survived was the first of the miracles.

The reliquary case was fixed to the sarcophagus, just past the head of the statue. It was a cage of gold and armourglass. Inside, the skull of Saint Aphrania rested on a cushion of violet silk.

‘Holy Aphrania,’ Stern prayed, ‘I have come to take you from this place. You have been vigilant over Parastas. Now it is I who needs your sight. You, who are worthy of the Emperor’s grace, grant me your intercession. Allow me to see by the God-Emperor’s light. Let me perceive the path I must take to redeem myself and prove myself worthy of His guidance once more.’

The tremors eased suddenly, as if the saint had commanded a moment of calm.

Stern removed her helm and her gauntlets. The front of the reliquary was hinged, and she opened it reverently. She paused, her hands a few inches from the skull. It was dark grey. The centuries lay on it, invisible yet weighty. In the dimness of the chamber, where the only light was the pulsing red of the rising lava, the eye sockets of the skull were dark and deep beyond fathoming.

‘You can see,’ Stern whispered. ‘Even now, you can see. Grant me this boon, that I may serve the Emperor as I should. Forgive me, now, as I presume upon your sanctity.’

Stern reached for the skull and picked it up.

She held it with both hands. She stared into its black gaze.

Nothing. No visions came to her. She saw nothing except old bone. She felt nothing except the slight weight of the skull in her hands.

‘Please…’ she begged. ‘Emperor. Father of Mankind! Will you not speak to me at last?’

The skull, aged to parchment fragility, crumbled to dust.

Stern howled. She sank to her knees, the fragments of bone spilling between her fingers. The chamber lurched again, but she didn’t care. She closed her eyes, burying her head in her hands. She keened, her cry utterly inarticulate because there were no words for this grief, this guilt, this despair. She was beyond redemption. Somehow, she had sinned so profoundly, departed in so irredeemable a way from the Emperor’s design for her, that there was no returning to His grace. There was only darkness, now. No visions would ever come again. No blessing of purpose. No guidance to show her how to fight for an Imperium that believed she was a monster and worse.

She cried out with all her soul. Her psychic identity reached out for the dream currents of the warp. Abandoned, she accepted her punishment and embraced the nothingness that awaited. She would not seek to see past it any longer. She would not delude herself into thinking forgiveness would come. She had been arrogant without knowing it, prideful to believe that her path had been so clearly and irrevocably delineated.

Then a great nothing came for her.

Her breath froze, silencing her cry.

The nothing moved.

The nothing advanced on her.

The blankness was something more than an absence. It was a monstrous presence. It was suffocating, smothering, a total blank, yet a blank that had something close to a substance. It was active.

This was not about her penance or her sin. This thing, this nothing, was not aimed at her. It was terrible, all-encompassing. The totality of the nothing showed her a truth so awful that she had never contemplated its possibility. Perhaps she should have seen it, in this long century and more that she had fought on world after world, desperate for any sign from the Emperor. Everywhere she went, the Ruinous Powers revelled in triumph. Everywhere she went, she faced civilisations plunging into darkness. Nowhere had she found any other active forces of the Imperium, beyond the desperate, lost remnants on those worlds. Every provisional victory had been one that she and Kyganil had had to forge on their own.

All that evidence, and she had not seen. She had not seen, because she had faith. Who, with faith, could conceive of this truth?

Who could believe the Imperium was gone?

Who could believe the God-Emperor was no more?

That was the truth of the nothing.

There could be no other explanation for a void so complete.

Stern rose. The tremors were shaking the chamber again, more and more violently. Steam filled the space, and the heat was unbearable. The floor trembled and split. The tomb of Saint Aphrania tilted to one side as its dais slumped. Stern looked at the ancient reliquary.

‘What must I do now?’

There was no saint to hear her. There was no miracle to be granted. Not any more.

It was time to leave.

Stern donned her helm and gauntlets once more. She formed the psychic shield again, blocking the worst of the heat. Wreathed in spirals of warp lightning, she rose from the buckling floor. Gathering speed, she flew up through the hole in the dome. The entire shrine shook, the tremor so huge that the walls seemed thin as parchment, brittle as glass. Stern looked down briefly as she climbed higher. The peak of the Mountain of Faith Eternal fell in on itself. The largest volcano on Parastas, and the longest to slumber, was finally awake. The crater opened, swallowing the shrine and the daemons that remained on its walls.

The memorial to Saint Aphrania disappeared. It had lived only a few moments longer than the relic it had held.

Stern turned away. There was nothing more to see here. She had to go higher. She sensed the need for one more confrontation to complete the growing truth in her soul.

She climbed higher and higher, leaving behind the raging land. She flew through incandescent clouds of ash and burning gases, into the dark storms over the volcanoes. Driven to fury by the concentrations of ash, lightning struck in every direction. Violent thunder merged with the deeper cracks and roars of the eruptions below. Winds buffeted her. Cyclones sought to pull her into their spirals of destruction.

She kept climbing.

For a long time, she suffered a different sort of blindness. She could see nothing in the darkness of the storms except for the flashes of lightning and the glow of the burns. She was surrounded by a maelstrom of destruction, one without direction and without features. She had no sense of where she was going, or how far remained until she arrived. Her path was concealed from her. It was a fit punishment, and she accepted it without complaint. She withstood the attacks of the storms and climbed, always higher.

Finally, she broke through the top of the clouds. Below her was the billowing black and red of the ash storms. Above, she looked into clear night. Below was the wound that the erupting volcanoes had cut into the flesh of Parastas. Above, cutting across the firmament, was the greatest of wounds.

She had thought the Emperor had forsaken her, that she was being punished for her failures, or perhaps, at last, for being the unclean, warp-tainted thing that she was.

He had not abandoned her. He had not fallen silent. He was gone.

What was the rift? Had it done more than conceal? Was it truly a wound, the mark left by that which had destroyed the Imperium and its father?

She looked at the atrocity in the void. Her soul recoiled to gaze upon it.

‘This is substance,’ Stern said to herself. ‘That is not nothing.’

The rift had made things vanish. Half the galaxy was on the other side of it, invisible to her. But it blotted out what she wished to see through its overwhelming presence. It was Chaos. It was the immaterium spilling over all boundaries into reality. It was destruction.

It was far more than nothing.

And it had been present for more than a century.

Suspended between the sight of two horrors, Stern turned her inner eye back to a third. To the smothering nothing.

Darkness. Void. Annihilation.

Approaching.

The nothing had swallowed the Emperor and His Imperium. And it was not done. It was still hungry. It was closing in. It would not be done until the galaxy entire was devoured. Perhaps it would not be sated even then. Nothing was coming, and it brought a final, endless, empty night.

It was too vast for her to see its contours. That was why it had been so easy to think it all a blankness directed at her. She sensed the movement now, though. She sensed the cold.

‘Emperor, I will fight on in your name until my last breath.’

She would confront the nothing. She did not know what it was, much less how to fight it. But she would struggle for this small, unconsumed part of the galaxy. She would struggle, with all the fury of her faith, to avenge the God-Emperor.

In the darkness between maelstroms, she had found her path.

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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 Anna Lakisova.

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