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The End and the Death: Volume I – Extract

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1:i

Sympathetic magic

When he was very young, no more than two or three hundred years old, he watched a man paint shapes upon a wall.

The painter used his fingers as brushes, and the skull-cups of animals as his pots. He painted antelope and bison, side-on, mid-leap. Startled, deer broke and ran across the wall. The painter drew men too. They had bows, and spears. He had never seen anyone paint a man before. He was very young.

It was not art, or decoration. It wasn’t a memorial of the hunt they had conducted the day before. It wasn’t a record of something that had been. That would have been a waste of valuable pigments. They had their memories for that.

Watching intently, he understood the painter was painting tomorrow. It was a statement of intention, of what would be. The painter was making a plan, and executing it. He was imposing his will.

This, the painter was showing them – the antelope, the bison, the men – this will be. The animals will break and run, like so. We will be here. These are the bows and spears we will carry. This – as his fingers moved from spear to antelope – this will be the path the spear will follow. This is where it will strike, this flank here. This will be our kill.

Watching, he understood that this was sympathetic magic. A ritual rehearsal to vouchsafe that what was once imagined would later come to pass. What was set out here on the wall in pigment would happen in life tomorrow. The antelope would not evade and get away, for here, see? It was already struck and dead.

The man was modelling the future.

To sanctify this, to commit to this specific configuration of tomorrow, the painter dipped his hand into a pot and pressed it, palm flat, against the wall. He left his mark, the mark of himself, on his plan. This is what will happen, and with my hand I signify it. It cannot be undone.

The antelope is already dead.

For this version of tomorrow to fail, the gods would need to turn against mankind and undo the laws of the world, laws which they had promised could not be undone.

By then, even so young, he had already learned to distrust gods. To distrust even the existence of gods. But the natural laws of the world seemed to operate, whether there were gods or not.

He watched the man paint, and he learned to plan. It was, in every sense, a revelation. He learned that a plan might secure the future, and it might be the work of one man, and to be certain of its success, it had proudly to bear the mark of his hand.

His handprints have been on his work ever since. He has been modelling the future for over thirty millennia.

He told me that story himself, years ago. I look at his hands now, hands that have since held the galaxy in their palms. I observe the fingers twitching slightly.

Very few people are permitted to stand this close to him. Few, indeed, are even admitted into his presence, much less allowed to approach so near that they are able to notice such subtle signs of human suffering. But I am his Regent, his advisor, his confidante. I am supposed to stay close to him. It is what he requires of me, so I have been as near to him as his shadow for a very long time.

Those hands. Those great and capable hands. They are sheathed in auramite, not because it is golden and regal, but because it is almost quantum-inert, and thus most efficacious for psionic sculpting and the manipulation of immaterial forces. Bare skin would be better, more precise and conductive. I know he has touched the immaterium with bare hands and a bared mind many times, but even he has his limits. The saturation of immaterial power now stands at such a level that direct contact would scald his flesh if he but brushed against it. Longer exposure would sear the meat off him, boil his blood, and fuse him to the seat he occupies.

So there he sits, armoured and warded in gold, silent and still, like some graven idol. No, worse… I fear he resembles the gaudy chieftain-kings and prophet-monarchs of the past, the petty upstarts and megalomanic bullies who carved dominions out of the carcass of humanity, and built frivolous nations, and caparisoned themselves in jewels and precious metals, and set crowns upon their heads, and declared themselves more than mortal. They were not, and he scorned them all, chastised them for their hubris, and had them cast down, by actions direct or indirect. He has dismantled nations, and ended dynasties, usurped tyrants and dictators, razed palaces, and cauterised bloodlines. He has painted the walls of innumerable throne rooms with blood, and left thrones empty.

He cannot leave this one.

I wait forever in the silence at the foot of the great dais. There is no one else close enough to heed what I notice, except for Uzkarel Ophite and Caecaltus Dusk, the exquisite ogres who stand watch either side of the steps. But the Legio Custodes proconsuls face outwards, immobile as sculpture, their backs towards him. They do not see what I see. They do not see his fingers tremble.

And subtle signs, be they traces of suffering or otherwise, are my art. Signs, symbols, signifiers, sigils: these are my instruments, the diacritical marks of reality through which I discern the true text of the world. I am his Sigillite, and I have fulfilled that role since this age began.

It is now about to end. Both my long service to him, and this very age itself.

Because his sons are coming to kill him.

1:ii

Fragments

They have crucified Titans along the Ultimate Wall.

Smoke, powder-thick and as dark as rancid meat, flows sideways across the sky. In places, the bodies of the dead are so numerous they look like sacks of grain stacked after harvest. The corpse-mounds have changed the contours of the ground.

On the Canis Causeway, in what would have been the shadow of the Lion’s Gate Wall, Maximus Thane yells to be heard above the endless howl of firestorms and shelling, and draws the Astartes of 22nd Exemplars into Repulse Formation Exactus. There is no cover. They lock-brace shields that are now grey with ash. Thane’s tactical sensorium counts barely seventy men left in his company. He tells himself the device is broken. The display is cracked and wires swing loose. It shows him nine hundred enemy tracks on the causeway alone. He orders himself to believe it is broken.

Inside the Lion’s Gate, the upper parts of which are entirely missing, lynched Knight engines of House Vyridion hang like game, trussed in spools of razor wire, and hooked from ramparts. Waste fluid – oil, coolant, blood – drools from their mangled cockpit-faces.

The traitor host boils in like a tidal spate, through broken gates, through breached walls, across the oblique slopes of once-vertical ramparts. They are gleaming scarab-black, horned and howling. A flash-flood surge, they pour through gaps, through fissures and cleft walls, beneath arches, and along once-golden avenues. They are deformed things, remade men, remade again, tusked ogres, semitaur obscenities, warrior-beasts with heads like whale skulls or skinned elk. They spill like a mudslide into the last, untouched sanctum of the Palace.

Abaddon, once the First Captain to whom all others aspired, is among them, both leading them and carried forward by the torrent. He is made destroyer, despoiler of worlds and life, arch-mythoclast. He will tear everything down, all the legends and structures and orders, even his own myth, which he once so proudly forged. He will cast off his hard-won glory and replace it with a new one, more glorious and far more terrible. He yells to his men. His words are no longer human.

They understand him anyway.

1:iii

Record of

an interview conducted

by Remembrancer Oliton

My father? I’ll tell you about my father. Of course. Anything you want to know.

My father, Mamzel Mersadie, my father once… Now this is a famous story, but I’ll tell it anyway… My father once reached a river, and he knelt down and wept. Famously, wept. He–

Wait. If I might suggest, let’s move off the bridge. At this hour of the watch, the bridge decks of the Vengeful Spirit are a busy place. My First Captain, that’s Ezekyle over there, he’s about to brief the Mournival and the senior company officers. The Interex are proving to be problematic. It’s unfortunate. There was a mistake born of misunderstanding. As you must appreciate, first contact protocols are complex. The meeting of two advanced civilisations inevitably involves issues of trust and comprehension. This is not easy work, as I think you’ve seen. I certainly regret what’s happening at the moment. Deeply. So let’s move through here into my apartments.

Yes, after you.

That’s better, you see? We can converse and hear ourselves think. Ezekyle can be so strident and intense. He’s briefing on the projected military operations that we are, sadly, now obliged to undertake. As I say, I deeply regret that it’s come to it. Yes, that’s correct. Military operations. Yes, there will be another war. In truth, my lady, there will always be another war.

No, I don’t have to be there. First Captain Abaddon is more than capable of handling the watch meeting. Yes, of course I trust him. I trust him with my life. He’s my son.

So, take a seat.

Anyway, my father. As I was saying, this was a very long time ago. It’s said he was known then as Alysaundr, or Sikander III ho Makedôn, I believe. He told me that, so it must be true. Anyway, he came to the River Hyphasis and crossed it, and wept, for, as he put it, ‘there were no new worlds to conquer.’

No, I think–

No, you misunderstand my point. I’m sorry, I didn’t make it clearly. I agree ‘conquer’ is an aggressive, militaristic term. A freighted word. Of course, the word he actually used was κατακτώ, for he was speaking a proto-form of Eleniki there, on the banks of the Hyphasis. So we can allow for some interpretation. It was a long time ago. I was citing the story as an example of aspiration. Our aspirations define us, I believe, more than anything. Beside the Hyphasis, my father wept because, at that time, he felt he had accomplished all he could. His ambitions were achieved. And the revelation shook him. He was not proud or satisfied, he was bereft.

Of course, as it turned out, there were many more worlds to conquer. The work had scarcely begun. On the banks of the Hyphasis he had won, not for the first time, nor for the last, the throne of the known world. Not long after that, he found another throne. A literal throne. That changed everything. Yes, found it. Well, that’s what he told me.

But I digress. The point I was making, however poorly, is that aspiration is the fire that drives us. We are restless and we strive. ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,’ if I remember the old verse correctly. There is always another world, Mamzel Mersadie, always another goal. We all take after him in that respect.

I’m sorry? And always another war. Yes, quite so.

You look at us, remembrancer, and you see beings wrought for war. No, no, don’t deny it. I know you do. I see the transhuman dread in your eyes when you regard me, or when you look at First Captain Abaddon, or any of my sons, my Luna Wolves. I don’t blame you. I terrify you, and I’m sorry for that. Truly. I look at you here, in this room, dwarfed by the scale of it. Like a child in that chair, a child on a throne, your feet swinging. It was built for my frame, not yours. I feel for you. You put a very brave and confident face on it, but I am sensible to your terror. To be here, to be surrounded by inhuman giants. It must be intimidating. I wish I could say something to reassure you, something to assuage your fear.

I will say this, Mersadie Oliton… I am more like you than I am not like you.

1:iv

Fragments

The dead and the living are now quite alike: all will burn on the same pyre.

Barely ten seconds dead, Uris Katjor, battle-brother, Imperial Fist, leans against the round-bitten rampart as though he is resting. His helmet is gone, and so are both of his hearts and the contents of his chest cavity. A sigh is still leaking out of him. He stares at the war through blown pupils.

Beyond, more bodies, hundreds more, left where they fell in the act of running away. Some appear asleep. Most are tossed in disarray, clumsily bent or poorly folded, in postures both uncomfortable and undignified. War has no patience for dignity. Some bodies don’t really look like bodies at all: too small, too awkward, too thin, too still. Death has made them mere debris, just fallen scraps of a falling city, tumbled in amid the shingle of cracked stone and fragmented metal. Just bundles of rags with sticks inside.

On the soaring ramparts of the Delphic Battlement, the sealed ring of last defence that surrounds the final fortress of the Sanctum Imperialis, Amit called Flesh Tearer weeps.

The Blood Angels legionary feels the constant concussion of the wall guns around and below him, and he weeps for what he has done, and for what he has left undone. Around him, ten thousand of his kind, other loyal sons, more perhaps, wait and weep too. They wait, armed and armoured, for the traitor flood to break against the last wall, and for the final battle to begin.

Blade braced against his chest, almost in prayer, he looks out from his high vantage across the landscape of the Palatine Zone. He looks out into hell. He sees great bastions burning through shrouds of smoke. Meru, Hasgard, Avalon, Irenic, Razavi, Golgotha, Cydonae… each one a symbol of Imperial power that once commanded a swathe of Palatine territory, each one now a colossal bonfire. The smoke stinks of shame and lost hope.

He weeps. His genesire, the Bright Archangel, has closed the Eternity Gate forever. Such a thing. A feat unparalleled. His Bright Lord saw off the greatest daemons of the world, broke them, and killed them, to hold back the tide long enough for the Gate to be sealed. Amit was one of the very last to make it inside.

Sanguinius, the lord of Amit’s life, paid grievously for that deed. Amit saw it with his own eyes: the brutal wounds, the ravaged plate, the immortal white wings – oh, how piteous! – stained and scorched, the feathers plucked, torn out, burned, charred–

He weeps for it. The sight of his lord so wounded will stay with him forever. But that is not what grieves him most. True misery lies in the meaning of the deed his lord performed.

The Gate has been closed. Amit cannot imagine the burden of that decision. To close Eternity is to concede defeat. It admits, to friend and foe alike, that the armies and champions of the Emperor, even Sanguinius of the Blood Angels Legion, can no longer prevent the enemy’s merciless advance across the Palatine, just as they could not stop the enemy at the first wall, or at the Outer Palace, or at the gates of Helios, Lion, Eirenicon or Anterior, or at Eternity Port or Colossi or Ultimate, or at any other site where they have been met and opposed. Months of war, the most ferocious Amit has ever witnessed, have done nothing but delay the inevitable. Closing Eternity is an act of desperation. It means the end is here, the death. It means the hour is so bleak that no choice remains: the Sanctum Imperialis must be sealed, for all that lies outside it is truly lost.

Lost, but not yet dead. The full horror of closing the Gate is that it consigned legions of their brothers, whole armies and hosts, to their doom. There was no time or room for retreat, no time to recall them or allow their withdrawal. They had to be left outside. Amit weeps because he knows this decision will haunt his lord longer than any wound he took. The decision feels like desertion. It feels like a second betrayal.

Amit thinks of those who did not make it through the closing gate, those left outside engulfed by frenzied World Eaters, his brothers, his kin, the armies stranded in the field, the brigades and regiments still warring on the Palatine plain, the men and women, the commanders and the common troopers, the battle-brothers, the great champions… abandoned all, to fight and strive and die beyond hope of salvation, selling their lives one by one in a storm of unhinged violence, doing whatever they can to slow the enemy’s inexorable progress towards the wall Amit now guards.

He weeps. He waits, he stares out at their hell, and he weeps for them all.

Flames dance upwards. The dead are just the dead. The living are just the dead who still feel grief and pain.

1:v

His persistent mystery

Respectfully, I call to him.

I don’t use my voice. I use my mind. My call is hushed and cautious, more like a murmured invocation and, I’m sorry to say, rather too much like a prayer.

He does not answer. I look for a sign, some intimation of response. There is none. I notice his hands clench again, involuntarily, against the arms of his throne, but that’s just another spasm of pain. My concern for him makes my own, weak hands clutch more tightly at the staff that keeps me upright. It wounds me to see him suffer. The pain he feels is intense – though he has known far worse – and it is continuous. He has been subjected to it for several years. It gnaws at him, and he endures. He will not let go, or break concentration. There is too much at stake, and still too much work to be done. He has harnessed the constant discomfort, and uses it as a drishti to focus his intent. This, I suppose, is why he does not hear me. He is too focused. The immaterial presses at him. Though the room is quiet, the warp howls in his ear.

However, I need him to break his concentration. That is why I’ve come to him, with great reluctance. We need to speak. We can no longer avoid the conversation that we have been postponing.

But he seems oblivious. He does not respond to my gentle psychic whispers. He does not even appear to know that I am here. He remains precisely the way he has been for months: still, silent, unseeing, immersed entirely in his vital, invisible labour. So, I must risk his displeasure and be persistent.

+My King-of-Ages…+

I have been his Sigillite long enough to know that he is aware of how he looks. He so detests this unfortunate aspect: a golden king, idle upon a golden throne. He dislikes seeming to be the very thing he has emphatically opposed. I have always known him to be very deliberate in his presentation. Over the millennia, he has worn many masks, each suitable to the task at hand. His mind, his greatest gift, allows him significant flexibility in such things. He has appeared as male or female, or neither, as child or elder, peasant or king, magician or fool. He has been an entire cartomantic arcana, for the Master of Mankind is also a master of disguise. He has performed all of these roles well, with delicacy. He has been humble when humility was needed, gentle when softness was the best device, sly, amiable, reassuring, commanding, caring. He has been terrible when terror was the only recourse, and sometimes meek in order to inherit the Earth. He has been whomever and whatever it has been necessary to be. No one has ever seen his true face, or learned his true name.

Not even me. I have known him by as many names as he has worn masks, and by as many faces. It occurs to me, belatedly, in this last hour of the final act, that perhaps, just like everyone else, I have only ever seen what he has allowed me to see. Perhaps, even if this room was filled with a multitude, I would still be the only one who would see a golden king upon a golden throne, the only one for whom those fingers would appear to tremble.

The notion is amusing that even now, after all we have shared, he still hides from me. It’s said I am a wise man, but I know only two things for certain. The first is that there is always something more to learn. His persistent mystery has taught me that.

The second is that, just a short while from now, he will finally grant me the opportunity to see and know the rest, all the things I have not yet learned, the full and final truths of creation.

And it will kill me. But I won’t refuse the opportunity. Who would? Who could?

I wait. I try again.

+Speak to me. Open your eyes, my Lord Imperator, my King-of-Ages, my old friend. Show me a sign. Wake, stir, speak to me. We have to talk.+

He has been a king, of course, many times. A regal aspect has frequently been required. During the years of global unification, it was often necessary for him to manifest as a warlord, because humans respond to authority when they are frightened or confused. During the period of galactic reclamation, he was obliged to stride among the stars in the guise of a warrior-king, armoured in gold, for that was the version of him that his young sons best understood. He had to seem like them, yet more glorious, so he could command their loyalty, their respect, and their devotion. It was war, so he became warlike. They would not have followed him otherwise, or obeyed his instruction. They would have doubted. He needed to be able to command them to the very ends of the stars, to secure their obedience across unimaginable distances, and sustain unswerving devotion even after he had left them. So he played that card: the Emperor. It was a version of himself that he found quite odious, but they rejoiced in it. They saw what they wanted to see. His sons committed utterly to the material war, and were so fortified and resolute that he felt he could leave the completion of the work to them.

Because he had to return. Time has never been his ally. He had to leave his children to conclude the material war among the stars and return to this seat underground, for the immaterial war had to be fought simultaneously. One victory was nothing without the other.

After Ullanor, he set that guise aside with relief. He set aside the plate, the helm, the incomparable blade, believing he would not need the aspect of war-king again, for he had left the material war in their capable hands.

In the hands of his chosen successor.

His sons…

I suppose they are my sons too, in a way, for I helped to make and shape them. The current pain of his immaterial toil is nothing compared to the pain of his grief. He is only human, after all. I lament, likewise. We both knew his sons would die, one day, one by one, casualties of the Great Work, for his configuration of tomorrow could not be accomplished without collateral loss. When he marked out his plan upon his wall for me, so that I could grasp the scope of it, he allowed for contingency and redundancy. If a son fell, there would be another to take his place. Even so, we thought they would last for centuries, or even millennia, a great dynasty devoted to the accomplishment of his design for, from the very start, paint on his fingers, he knew that he could not do it alone. Thus, we made sons for him. We believed that when the necessary wars were done, those sons and their father would enjoy the long peace together, and they would walk alongside him towards tomorrow.

Those sons, at least, who could be rehabilitated from the brutal mindset of warfare.

But the gods are against him. The false gods, the False Four. They have been trying to thwart him since he began his work, for they know that his success will signal the end of them. Fearing his version of tomorrow, they have turned against him and undone the laws of the world. We have known disappointments before. Failures. Setbacks. Many times, we have been forced to revise, and fashion a modified path around an obstruction. One does not sustain a plan across thirty millennia without a degree of flexibility.

We have known defeats, but not this.

His plan is damaged. I’m not sure if we can salvage it and set it back in motion. That is his avowed intention, and mine too, but the gods are devious. They have spilled the pigments, and smeared their handprints on the wall, erasing his marks, over-painting, altering, desecrating. Without finesse, with crude and primitive fingermarks, they have daubed their own sympathetic magic, contrary to his. The spear in this man’s hand is broken. The antelope has startled and run clear, out of bowshot, lost in thickets that were not there yesterday.

+Speak to me. Show me a sign. Open your eyes, my lord.+

Unable to contest the immaterial war, the gods, to my dismay, have turned the material war against him instead. The world that we carefully built together is being hammered into fragments.

And his sons are dying.

+Wake, stir, speak to me. We have to talk.+

To win now, to reconfigure tomorrow, he will be required to kill more of them.

Click here to buy The End and the Death: Volume I.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2023.
This eBook edition published in 2023 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.
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