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Journey of The Magi – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Journey of The Magi

Jonathan Green

The orb designated as the Godstar tumbled through the void as it had done for countless aeons. More artefact than world, it was not bound to the gravity well of any one celestial body. The light cast by dying suns barely penetrated the oily green corona surrounding it, painting the monolithic structures covering the comet-sized construct’s surface with their suffused luminescence.

Below the protective shield, before a smooth obsidian pyramidal edifice, space-time deformed and buckled. Strands of coral-coloured warp matter and aquamarine etheric energy bled out from a rent in reality. Forming into tendrils, they behaved like the tentacles of some deep-sea cephalopod testing the limits of their new habitat.

The writhing corona of kaleidoscopic colours widened, as the hole opened in front of the pyramid. With ice crystals frosting the void-black stones of the processional avenue onto which they stepped, three figures emerged from the portal.

First through was Prototokos the All-Seeing, warp-mage of the Thousand Sons Legion. Eerie green light cast by carved channels in the blockwork of the pyramid reflected from the greaves and vambraces of his turquoise battleplate, while the shimmering cloth-o’-gold icon banner tied at his waist undulated in the unseen breezes of the warp as he walked. So too did the blood-red cape that hung about his shoulders. In one gauntleted hand Prototokos carried a heavy, curse-bound, star-matter blade, which seemed to draw light into itself.

Second, and more impressive still, came Sorcerer-Magister Opados. He was clad in an elaborately ornamented suit of Terminator armour that had survived the fall of Tizca and the burning of Prospero, its myriad battle scars and subsequent repairs adding a gravitas that only age and experience could bring. The crimson cape secured to his auto-reactive shoulder pads flapped in the warp wind. A pair of flattened golden horns, inlaid with platinum and lapis lazuli, rose from his turquoise helm. These features were echoed in the projections that crowned the force stave he carried, the emerald eye-stone set within the tip of the staff rolling and blinking erratically. Standing ten feet tall, Opados was still dwarfed by the edifice that rose before him to more than twenty times his height.

Arch-Magister Tritos, the last of the three, did not step from the portal but glided through it, his feet placed firmly on the back of a thing that was a warp-born amalgam of impossible flesh and gold-chased steel. It resembled a circular platform but with nine great gilt blades rising at equidistant points from its rim, while between those, nine watery eyes bulged and blinked – every part of them painted in shifting shades of blue, from their fleshy lids to their whites and malformed irises.

And the master of the daemon was no less awe-inspiring than the warp beast he had tamed. The sorcerer was clad in a turquoise war-suit, trimmed with gold and inlaid with precious gems, the serpent sigil of the Thousand Sons Legion that adorned his left pauldron turning slowly as it chased its fiery tail. The pauldron protecting his right shoulder bore the Cult of Time’s own writhing icon, a swollen snake pregnant with the possibilities of myriad futures.

Great golden horns, so intricately detailed they looked as if they had grown from the sorcerer’s head rather than having been cast by an artisan of the forge, rose from the crown of his helm, while other antler-like growths curved downwards to frame the front plate of the exalted one’s visor.

His ornate armour was half-hidden by the heavy robes he wore. The gold-embroidered scarlet chasuble gave him the appearance of a scholar or a priest, as much as his battleplate marked him out as a formidable warrior.

Adorning the plastron of his war- and warp-scarred armour was a scarab beetle as large as a man’s head. Sculpted from a single piece of red alabaster, it seemed to cling to the front of the sorcerer’s carapace, looking like it might suddenly crack open its wing cases and take flight at any moment.

During the Faronic Age of ancient Terra, aeons past, the primitive peoples of that dim and distant time had believed the scarab god renewed the sun every day, rolling it above the horizon and continuing to carry it through the underworld after sunset, only to renew it again the following dawn. And so it continued day in day out, season after season, year after year, for all eternity.

It was no coincidence that the beetle had been claimed by the Cult of Time’s Sect of the Crimson Scarab. The magisters of that faction treated time as if it were a tapestry, to be unravelled and resewn as they saw fit, striding through the warp to unpick the past and reorder it in a manner that would echo down through the centuries and aid them in their conquests in the future. To an exalted sorcerer-magister of the Crimson Scarab, past, present and future were mutable and interchangeable, if circumstances so required.

Behind the three magi the immaterial vortex contracted and closed. The echoes of the concussive boom of displaced air that followed the sealing of the rent rippled across the surface of the comet world like laughter, while a shock wave of ethereal spectra swept across the underside of the flickering green force field that stretched from one horizon to the other.

Arch-Magister Tritos of the Heralds of Destiny regarded the angular pyramid before him with a disdainful eye. As he did so, the dragon-head exhaust ports which rose from the power pack that energised his armoured suit turned to regard it too, with unblinking golden eyes.

The processional avenue leading to the edifice was a grand affair, precisely incised geometric channels running on either side, pulsing with the same intense emerald light that writhed in a sickly aurora above the artificial Godstar.

Without a word being spoken, the three sorcerers set off down the stone throat of the avenue. The arch-magister astride his disc led the way, the daemonic entity leaving a trail of iridescent ether stuff in its wake, while gold-embroidered sigils adorning the hem of Tritos’ rippling robes performed a strange, esoteric dance all of their own.

As tall as a Battle Titan, the pyramid’s entrance was constructed of a smooth onyx broken only by a series of circles and lines that formed the demarcation glyph of the impossibly ancient dynasty that had constructed the comet. It was a symbol Tritos had seen again and again, from Kovarian IV to Port Stormshield, etched upon the wraithbone ruins of the aeldari in the Shifting Deserts of Osiris Primus, and inscribed in blood throughout the myriad volumes of the writings of the mad prophet Mortsafe in the dusty libraries of Kelock on the dead world of Narthax. And in its form he now understood its meaning, although that had not been the case the first time he had beheld it in the mirrored waters of his scrying pool.

Consisting of three overlapping circles, superimposed upon one another in green-black stone and near-white light, as well as other emanating rays and discs, it was the symbol of the Nephrekh Dynasty of the aeons-old necrontyr.

The thin light of the Halo Stars struggled to penetrate the flickering gauss defences that surrounded the necron-constructed comet craft. The verdigris glow of the sky shield bathed the sorcerers’ gold and turquoise armour, the light reflecting from their polished battleplate casting rippling reflections on the onyx walls of the processional avenue, making it appear as if they were moving through the pelagic depths of some ocean world rather than across the surface of a deep space fastness.

None, beyond the immortal phaerons of the necron race themselves, knew how many such celestial engines and timeless artefacts there were adrift within the vastness of the galaxy. The name ‘World Engine’ was still spoken of in hushed tones in star systems across a hundred sectors, from the Reefs of Melanoptera to the tribal territories of the T’au Empire offshoot septs in the Damocles Gulf. But it hadn’t been the only such manifestation of the necrons’ world-shaping mega-technology.

The Godstar was another such ancient artefact, unknown to the myriad intelligent species that populated the galaxy. Indeed, it was unknown to all outside the necron race, other than for these three sons of the Crimson King, these three who had discerned its location by studying the cuneiform script pressed into baked clay tablets on arid Za’handra. These three who had scoured the mind of a t’au ethereal having boarded the xenos’ Gal’leath-class explorer vessel seeking more information, and left it to the mercy of void-devourers when they departed. These three who had journeyed across countless battlefields and warzones, across great gulfs of time and space, to reach this place, in what, for the time being at least, they would consider to be ‘now’.

‘The way ahead is closed,’ said Prototokos, regarding the entrance and its Titan-tall warding glyph, as the three magi halted before the cyclopean doorway at the end of the descending defile.

‘Indeed,’ agreed Opados, scouring its surface with his eyes, even as his psychic senses probed its defences, searching for a means of ingress, ‘but there is always–’

‘Another way,’ finished Tritos.

The arch-magister’s hands began to twist and dance in the air before him, manifesting esoteric gestures of serpentine sorcery as he sought to fold time and space with what appeared to be no more than a snap of his fingers.

To look upon the cerulean flesh of his left hand was to look upon the armoured skin of his gauntlet, the warping effects of millennia having merged flesh and bone and ceramite into one, to form a new and unique warp-made amalgam.

As he began to unknit the fabric of reality, the air before them seemed to jerk and twist and extrude itself in obeisance to his flexing fingers, while glowing warp runes became visible, crawling up and down the vambrace of the arch-magister’s left arm. The threads that made up the matter of the universe were loosed into thin strands of pink and blue warp-stuff, which clung to his dancing digits like sticky cobwebs.

What started as a few loose strands soon became a gaping hole. And through that hole, superimposed upon the sealed gateway, could be seen a dusty darkness that was spared the attentions of the flickering aurora of the sky shield.

Taking hold of the edges of the hole, Tritos pulled and stretched the limits of the portal until it was large enough to admit even Opados, cocooned within his Terminator armour.

‘This way,’ Tritos said, pointing. ‘This is our other way.’

‘Will it take us straight to the heart of this place, and the prize we seek?’ asked Opados.

‘No,’ admitted the arch-magister. ‘The deeper levels of this sphere harbour warding technology that prevents it.’

‘But this is enough,’ stated Prototokos. ‘Where our powers of sorcery will not suffice, we will turn once again to bolter and blade to clear a path to the prize.’

In one stride, the warp-mage made the translation from the surface of the artefact-comet to the tomb’s silent interior. He was followed by Sorcerer-Magister Opados, with Arch-Magister Tritos passing through the portal last, carried on the back of his warp steed.

The hole healed itself again and the tomb was briefly illuminated by a flash of witch-light. As the boom of the portal’s closing faded fast, lost among echoing sepulchral halls, the rows of golden warriors were for a moment made visible, before fading back into the shadows, and the all-pervading hush returned.

Not that the sorcerers needed any light to make out the serried ranks of the tomb’s occupants. The optical enhancements of their helms enabled them to pick out every detail of the motionless figures.

They were almost skeletal, not unlike mortal men in form and size, but with limbs made of metal, their bodies encased in gold.

But where the souls of mortal beings would have burned with fierce fire to the witch-sight of the sorcerers, these endless ranks of necron warriors were dull and dead, the brightest thing about them their tarnished armoured body-shells.

They looked like they would not have appeared out of place standing upon plinths within the statue-lined galleries of the twisted silver towers of Tizca.

‘Are they dead or merely dormant?’ Prototokos asked, as if addressing the darkness.

‘Does it matter?’ grunted Opados, his voice distorted by his helm into a daemonic growl.

‘We are here to release the prisoner, nothing more,’ said Tritos. ‘Which way does the vault lie?’

Prototokos scanned the gloom, slowly turning his head from left to right and back again, like a near-blind old man seeking the glow of a lumen-globe. He stopped abruptly, facing what was not so much an archway as a gap in the far wall of the tomb-chamber that ran from floor to ceiling, fully tall enough to admit a Battle Titan god engine.

‘This way,’ he said.

‘Then lead on,’ said Tritos. ‘Our prize awaits.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Inferno! Volume 4 in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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