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Primacy – Extract

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Primacy

Marc Collins

‘It is not the ashes that matter, for though they are cradle and crucible, they are not the flame.

It is only through the fire that the phoenix truly rises.’

– Attributed to the primarch Fulgrim. Source unrecorded.

The station hung alone in the vastness of the void, insignificant in every way that mattered. In the times of peace and plenty which had accompanied the Great Crusade’s bold sweep through the sector, it had only ever been a footnote. Something to be ignored or collated into wider logistical notes. Agri-station Pyrus Sigma 45-1 had played a minor role in supplying the worlds of the Satrian Gulf with viable foodstuffs and medicinal analogues.

It had never known more attention than when the bulk lifters had come and gone, arriving empty and leaving with their holds bursting with produce. The war had put paid to those days of monotonous splendour. Now the station hung and turned emptily, its former occupants fled or committed to the very soil they had tended. Until this moment it had been forgotten and dead, yet now it was reborn for a singular purpose.

The vessels which crowded about the agri-station were riotous in their diversity. Hulls glimmered with encrusted jewels and ornamental gilding, spreading across their surfaces like luxurious cancers. Others were scarred and stripped back to bare adamantine, showing with overweening pride where they had braved the guns of the enemy. More still were marked with the rakish lines of claws where their Geller fields had failed or been intentionally lowered, where the Neverborn’s fickle attentions had teased and bitten across the plating as though it were flesh. Another vessel had taken the metaphor to heart, and swathes of its outer hull were decorated with culled human flesh, the panels flash-frozen in the void’s embrace.

From the upper tiers of the Proudheart’s bridge, Lord Commander Eidolon gazed out with utter disdain at the appointed venue. His fingers spasmed and clenched about the haft of his thunder hammer.

Glory Aeterna was a beautiful weapon, utterly at odds with the living ruin which Eidolon had become. What remained of his once lustrous hair was now matted and thin, clinging to a withered scalp. His throat pulsed with strange organs and growths, thrumming with the desire to unleash violence. His stance, even idle, spoke of ceaseless internal torment. Pain radiated from him, and yet where it would break others, Eidolon felt increasingly exalted. It was a gift to be embraced, a sensation to be savoured.

That is what so few of them understand. To serve no master but your own ambition and to glory in nothing but your agony.

‘Pitiful, is it not?’ he mused. ‘That we are reduced to this so soon after our great triumph?’

‘The primarch’s triumph,’ Von Kalda allowed, carefully. The Apothecary toyed idly with his narthecium, as though eager once again to put it to use. Bloody medical trophies dangled from his belt, surgically altered for the maximum aesthetic impact. Behind them the hooting and braying of the Kakophoni rose sharply, like beasts scenting prey. ‘We gather in the wake of his apotheosis, after all. His ascension.’

Eidolon burbled out a chuckle. ‘Ascension, yes,’ he crooned, and stepped forwards, reaching one hand out towards the oculus. The colours therein had begun to shift, changing as though on a god’s whim. Reality grew increasingly thin around them. Eidolon was almost aware of someone, something, watching them. Eyes beyond the veil drifting over them, assessing them as though for weakness. ‘Is that you, Father?’ he said to himself, laughing.

‘Lord?’ Von Kalda asked. The other warrior had clearly heard Eidolon’s pronouncement and yet pretended ignorance. As though afraid he might catch whatever madness afflicted the lord commander. The pain of rebirth. How could any of them truly understand? Perhaps only the absent primarch could understand now, lost in the moves of a game that the Legion could only guess at.

‘Nothing,’ Eidolon snapped. He turned away from the glass and took in the beautiful riot of his command deck, recentring himself. The great song swelled around them till the deck trembled, till the ship was almost an instrument in itself. Skirling its melody out into the void, poisoning reality with its very existence. ‘An idle thought, equerry. We will be amongst brothers soon. I will not be allowed my… introspections then.’

‘You anticipate resistance?’

Eidolon attempted a shrug and felt the twinge as his flesh rebelled once more. He gurgled appreciatively and felt the organs in his throat realign. He could anticipate the moment of his glorious loss of control. In his mind’s eye the bridge cracked and fell in, the gilding shattered, the pearlescent oculus blinded, the ranks of slaves cast to the broken decking. He could picture, in intimate detail, the exact moment they died. Blood upon branded skin, control apparatus and pain-goads ruptured and sparking.

Somewhere, in the chambers of my soul, there is laughter, even now…

He blinked away the thought, the alien imagining, and turned back to his equerry. ‘Where once we evinced a perfect unity, now there is only discord. Yet the chaos Fulgrim has left in his wake is nothing if not an opportunity.’ Eidolon’s tongue lolled from his mouth, tracing around his lips. ‘I intend to take advantage.’ He laughed again, the sound echoing oddly amidst the clamour of the bridge. ‘I would give us direction once again. Not for the sake of our absent father but for the ends our gods have given us. Come, equerry.’ Eidolon gestured with one tremorous hand. ‘Let us see what my brothers have wrought.’

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A Black Library Publication

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ISBN: 978-1-80407-390-2

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