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Penumbral Spike

Ben Counter

Time stretched into the distant future above, banded in the streaked black stone of Obstiria, reaching through another ten thousand years of war to the end of everything. There the Emperor waited, flanked by the billions of warriors who had fallen in His name, to vanquish the Great Enemy in the culmination of all battles.

Below, the past rolled out into the darkness, falling down to Obstiria’s core through millennia of past glories and tragedies. Through the Altigenos Purges and the Black Crusades of the Arch-Traitor, the Age of Apostasy and the hellish vistas of the Scouring. There lay the Great Crusade and the Great Heresy, the crumbling obscurity of times that lay before the coming of the Emperor. The Age of Strife boiled like a river of black blood at the nadir of time, rushing over the forgotten horrors of the Dark Age of Technology.

Mighty heroes stood astride the burning worlds of myth. First amongst them was the Emperor Himself, the beginning and the end of all history, His face hidden by the glare of His divinity. His son, the Primarch Guilliman, bearing the weight of the Imperium on his shoulders. Fulminos, the greatest Obsidian Glaive who had ever walked the galaxy, echoed the image of Guilliman as he struck down alien, daemon and heretic with his blade of black glass.

Brother Molkis saw from the beginning to the end. The Obsidian Glaives were not just an army, not even just a Space Marine Chapter. They were a pillar of the history of mankind, forged by the will of the Emperor to bear up the shield that staved off the extinction of the human race. All their glories, past and present, spun around Molkis at a thousand years a moment.

He could see it all, from the Great Crusade and the Heresy to the Age of Imperium and the founding of the Obsidian Glaives Chapter, through the endless wars to defend humanity and on to the future. Those myths that had their origins in the prehistory of the Imperium ran on through the present, that arbitrary point where Molkis himself stood, and on until the end. It was a comfort to Molkis, who had fought in those wars, to know the victories that he had bled for would roll on until the end of time.

Then he saw his hands. The hand that had held his chainsword and his bolter were gone. They were ugly masses of metal, painted black and pitted with old battle scars. One was a cylindrical power fist, four fingers radiating out, powered by pistons to seize and crush. The other ended in a pair of lascannon barrels. Not hands at all, but the weapons of a war machine.

His body was not his body, but the massive body of that machine. A power plant thudded its slow rhythm behind him. His eyes were not eyes but the lenses of picters mounted on the front of his hull, transmitting flickering images through his optic nerves.

And around him was not the endless vista of his Chapter’s history but dark and dismal cloisters, with a vaulted ceiling overhead and implements of incarceration and punishment on the walls. Manacles hung alongside thumbscrews and paring blades. On the ceiling was mounted a full-length body harness of spiked iron bands, a testament to endless suffering.

Someone was speaking. Molkis looked down and felt his whole body tilt, a tank-sized sarcophagus clad in ceramite. He saw his massive steel feet against the cracked flagstones of the cloisters, and the enormous shadow he cast in the light of the torches burning on the pillars.

A Space Marine Scout stood beside Molkis – an Obsidian Glaive, his demi-armour in the black and bone of the Chapter. He was young, midway through his transformation into a full Space Marine, the surgical scars still pink against the skin of his face and scalp.

‘Molkis!’ repeated the Scout. ‘Brother Molkis, come back to us! The time has come to fight!’

Molkis felt connections sparking in the back of his mind, accessing the data-medium stored in his sarcophagus. The name ‘Desaan’ was projected onto his consciousness. This Scout was named Desaan. Brother Desaan of the Tenth Company.

‘Are you with us, Brother Molkis?’ continued Desaan. ‘We need you now. Of all times, of all battles, we need you now.’

Molkis’s picters scanned around. The data-medium told him he was in the Penumbral Spike, in the Cloisters of the Bold, where the cold of the earth met the heat of Obstiria’s core. Below were the generatoria and forges, and above were the sparring halls and cell blocks. He had once walked these halls, marching alongside his brothers. Now this machine walked in his place – this Dreadnought, this war machine in which he was the pilot.

‘I am with you,’ said Brother Molkis.

‘Do you remember?’ asked Desaan.

‘Remember?’

‘You are Brother Molkis of the Fourth Company,’ said Desaan. ‘You fell to the Kraken at Devilin Reach. You were wounded but the Apothecaries stayed your death, and you were mounted in this Dreadnought. Do you remember?’

Flickers of pain burst at the back of Molkis’s memory. He remembered a tide of monstrous flesh, and the chill of a bony blade spearing through him. He remembered the cold of the blood draining from his body.

‘Yes,’ said Molkis. ‘I remember.’

‘Good,’ said Desaan, with obvious relief. Molkis realised that Desaan had gone through this same conversation many times. ‘War has come, my brother. We need you at the front line, on the battlements.’

‘But we are at Penumbral Spike,’ said Molkis, ‘on Obstiria. We are not at war. This is our fortress-monastery, where we are inviolable. Or do I remember wrongly, Brother Desaan?’

‘You remember right,’ said Desaan. ‘Obstiria is invaded. The Penumbral Spike is besieged. The greenskins are here.’

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