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The Resting Places – Extract

A Black Library Imprint

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COLLAPSE

J H Archer

Geometry collapsed first. His surroundings were pulled apart like hot glass, re-melded and remoulded and cast in sharp relief against the infinite darkness. Then his senses collapsed, and the light became so brilliant he thought he’d swallowed a star.

A voice echoed across the bright, inky blackness, thin and yet resonant, young and yet old, and try as he might, he could not capture its meaning. Pressure built. His head burst like an aquafruit. The colours were unlike anything he’d seen before. The freedom was nauseating.

Then the words became clearer. Clear, and simple, like all terrible things. They said:

‘It’s good to exist. Oh, how good it is to finally exist.’

Then his lungs gave way and he passed out.

A deep breath, and then life. Navigator Aelfric Gorst opened his eyes, and reality came flooding back.

It wasn’t a pleasant return. His head buzzed like an overworked hydrocarbon engine, his throat felt as if it wouldn’t stop cramping, and as hard as he tried, he simply could not make sense of his surroundings. There was light and there was noise, but the two did not seem to match up. He clutched on to the nearest solid thing, screwed his eyes shut and waited for the pain to abate.

And finally, after an eternity, it did. Numbness followed, but with it, sense. He opened his eyes to a familiar scene.

He was in the sanctum aboard the Imperial Destroyer the Vivat Rex. He had two arms, two legs, an intact skull and as far as he could tell, his lungs were now functioning well enough to breathe. It was dim, unusually dim, and the hooded wall lights glowed a pale, lambent green. Little was illuminated except the key walkways, the main control area and the central staircase that connected the two levels of the sanctum, all of which were cut from the same dark wood. From floor to roof were carved endless reliefs depicting victories hard won by ancient ancestors of his noble house, and in the glow the figures took on a strange and unfamiliar ghoulishness. The architecture of the space all seemed to tend towards the centre, at which point was a small golden throne, on which he currently sat.

He tried to stand up but found that he could not. His legs didn’t want to move, his chest seemed to be paralysed and something tugged at the back of his skull. The effort of the attempted movement made his vision thrum and vibrate, and it was all he could do not to retch.

He breathed in. A pain shot through his head. He breathed out.

The nausea abated, and the nature of his entrapment quickly became clear. He was connected to the throne by a steel harness, the kind he employed when a warp jump was particularly turbulent. He tugged at the release catches on the left-hand side, just below his ribs, but they had become stiff and uncooperative, and he could not undo them. Besides, the cables that connected him to the nervous system of the ship remained attached to the back of his skull, and without help he would not be able to safely remove them.

‘Morgana? Swift? Where are you? I require assistance.’

No response.

‘Anyone? Damn it, I require assistance!’

Nothing but silence.

He was stuck. Gorst swallowed the panic and sought other means of escape.

His consoles were all dead, except one, which seemed to be working only intermittently. He jabbed it once, twice, but the feedback was minimal. A meagre data-stream entered his consciousness: he could see the exterior hull was barely holding, having suffered catastrophic damage across ninety-three per cent of its surface; the ship was running on reserve power, sustaining only the essential systems; the realspace navigation systems were down, along with any pict-feeds displaying the universe outside the ship.

They could be anywhere.

And what was worse was that Gorst couldn’t even remember how he got here.

Someone on the ship would know. He barked an order into his comm-bead, but all he got back was static. He tried once, twice, three times, but garnered no response. Maybe it was a problem with the power? Perhaps the vox signal was weak, and if he simply rerouted some of the emergency power to the sanctum… There!

The lights snapped back on, and for a moment the glare blinded him.

His eyes found the remains of his assistant first. Gorst could tell the man was dead from the reflective sheen which glinted off the trail of blood that extended across the ebony floor of the sanctum, a garish red path that seemed to stretch out forever. He could tell the man was dead from the marble complexion of his face, stuck in a pale grimace, one arm extended towards the alarm panel on the far door. Furthermore, Gorst observed him in two places at once – his torso being at one end of the bloody trail, by the central elevator, and the bottom half still strapped firmly into the assistant’s chair just to the left of Gorst’s own. In fact they were all dead, all twenty-seven of his staff, their insides now being their outsides, some of them so thoroughly disseminated throughout the sanctum that Gorst couldn’t tell where one began and one ended.

He didn’t know whether to scream or to laugh, so complete was the display of violence. It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen real death before – being attached to the Imperial Navy for as long as he had been, death was as common as warp sickness. No, it was just that something about the scene felt wrong. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something that stuck in the back of his throat.

But then, movement somewhere behind, and baser instincts prevailed.

Gorst grasped at a button on the arm of his throne, jabbing at it blindly, until within the body of the right arm was revealed a small, snub-nosed laspistol. He snatched at it with shaking hands and thumbed the safety rune, the weapon warming in his hand. He tried to activate the swivel of his chair, but the micro grav-engines did not respond. He tried to lean out to see what was coming, but his movement was hampered by the hundreds of wires still attached to his person. All he could do was wait.

‘Who’s there?’ he called.

‘Whoze ther?’ returned a thin voice.

‘Present yourself!’

‘Prez-ent yorzelf!’

‘I am armed! I will fire upon you if you do not show yourself immediately!’

‘I amarm! I will virepon y-y-y… y-y-y…’

The movement got closer and closer, until a soft whirring inhabited the space just behind Gorst’s throne. Something breathed. Gorst didn’t. A series of soft taps on the back of the chair. A gentle tugging at the wires that connected to his skull sockets. And finally, small footsteps.

When the child’s face finally came into view, things began to melt away, and darkness returned.

You found a path through the undergrowth and into my lands. You trod upon my precious flowers and trailed your mud through the hallways of my home. I’m not angry, though. You don’t have to worry. I’m not angry.

His skull was in a thousand pieces and his mind spread around the curvature of a small black hole. Time giggled in his ear. His soft pallet buzzed like an insect.

Thing is, now I’m here, I don’t want to go home. Or, I do, but I’m worried I won’t be able to find my way back out again. I like it out here. There’s so much to see.

In his hands he held something, but he knew he had to hide it. It was his, and he wouldn’t share it with anyone.

Help me, and I’ll help you.

He hid the thing in his hand. He clutched at it.

Show me how it all began.

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WARHAMMER HORROR

A BLACK LIBRARY IMPRINT

‘Aberration’, ‘Bird of Change’, ‘Blood Drinker’, ‘The Isenbrach Horror’ and ‘The Vintage’ published digitally in 2021.
‘King of Pigs’, ‘Pain Engine’, ‘The Gnarled Bough’, ‘The Pharisene Paradox’, ‘The Somewhere Sister’ and ‘The Stacks’ published digitally in 2022.
This eBook edition published in 2023 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Emma Eaton-Knight.

The Resting Places © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2023. The Resting Places, Warhammer Horror, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-80026-907-1

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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