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The Successors – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Daemones non operantur nisi per artem.

– Grimoire Purgatus

Sight is the last of my senses they mutilate.

I have been all but deafened with endless chanting designed to break my will, suffered red-hot chains of fire at my neck, choked on the cloying reek of noxious incenses, and had vials of their physiker’s poisons forced down my throat.

I have endured it all without breaking, spat my fury back in their masked faces.

But now they come for my eyes.

Their brutal alchemies are still slowing me, and heavy chains bind my wrists, neck and ankles to the iron frame of an excruciation throne. Mute servitors with dead faces and blood-red eyes drill into my immobile skull, and I tense my jaw as steel anchors extend into my parietal and sphenoid bones.

I grit my teeth. I have known worse pain. What is to come will be much worse.

I have known pain every day since I was deemed worthy for ascension and they gave my flesh to another. I accept it. I use it. Pain is part of who I am. Every time the doomed, weeping serfs fix my warplate to my scarified flesh, I know pain will come.

Blood flows down the side of my head. I taste its metallic tang as it runs into my mouth.

I relish it, feel its ancient potency.

The blood is the power, the strength, and the source.

A mask of black iron is fitted over my face. Whirring clamps extend, peeling my eyelids back and slitting them from my head with a buzz of blades. I barely notice the pain. A gag of frozen iron is pressed into my mouth, burning my gums and forcing my jaw apart – so wide I feel the skin at the corners of my mouth split.

The servitors step back, and I hear recitations: dogmatic scripture from a book, its nature familiar to me from a long-ago ritual. The words are relayed into the room via a winged cherub augmitter hanging upside down on a cable by its ankle. It sways gently from a flaking roof girder next to a slowly rotating ceiling fan with only a single blade remaining.

Wait… Are they praying for me?

Do they think to purge my soul before they mutilate me?

Wild laughter bubbles up a throat made raw and bloody by vile recitations, but all that emerges from my split maw is a retching, hacking death rattle.

My lidless eyes scan the room. The walls are tiled in pale ceramic, pitted with old blood.

The floor is a fine metal grille, its mesh dripping with rust and clotted blood. This last detail, together with the heavy, bovine reek of fear, tells me I am in an abattoir’s kill-chamber: a place where beasts and men have been driven towards hooded figures with knives whetted for their murder.

A cell. A place they think safe enough to cage me.

Then, bright light; blinding. Something moves within it.

A figure enters the room, robed in black and wearing the onyx death mask of a chirurgeon. His back and arms are scaffolded in clicking, ratcheting instruments of surgical steel. The stuttering light of the only remaining lumen gleams from innumerable blades and needles.

He is attended by acolytes in similar robes, their faces likewise hidden like cowards. Each bears a guttering candle and whispers something just below the threshold of hearing, but which buzzes in my ear like a trapped insect.

The chirurgeon looks at me through his glossy mask with eyes of pale blue that seem almost pitying. He steps close and runs a leather-gloved hand over my shaven scalp.

The servitors have already torn out my killing implants, the wounds still wet, but his touch is gentle, as though concerned he not cause any suffering beyond that which he has been ordered to inflict.

‘So rare to capture one of your kind alive,’ he says.

His eyes roam across my naked flesh: the web of ash-rubbed scars, the tattooed symbols of excoriation culled from blood-soaked tomes, the ritual tally marks of death. I have paid in blood for each of these signs, mine and that of my enemies.

I want to spew hate at him, to curse him and his deluded kind, but the iron gag keeps me silent. For now. When they remove it, as I know they must, I must fight the urge to spit my venom and tell him of all the murderous ruin I will visit upon him and his followers.

His acolytes spread out, three to either side, still whispering their useless catechisms. I cannot make out the words, but I feel them against my skin like tiny, rasping needles, probing and pricking me like an electric current.

Their words make my eyes itch, and I wish I could blink.

The quality of the light changes, and I turn my eyes past the chirurgeon to the rusted bronze eagle on the wall. Shock-pulses from the bombardments above have set it askew, but the chirurgeon cares little for the blasphemy. The lumen sways from side to side as the pulses fade, and light plays over the eagle’s face.

A face in light, a hooded eye in darkness, then reversed.

The instruments of the chirurgeon’s trade unfold from his arms, each like the curling stinger of a jungle-devil, gleaming with threat and dripping with the promise of agony.

Another seismic rumble trembles the chamber walls. Closer this time. This deep in the building, I cannot tell to which faction the guns belong. Dust drifts from the ceiling, stirred into patterns of significance by the lone blade of the fan. Some of it settles upon my eyes in a gritty film.

Two more detonations close by. The entire building shudders.

One of the acolytes stumbles, and I feel his robes brush the ends of my fingertips.

I don’t waste my chance.

I seize him, curling my fingers around his robe and pulling him in close.

He struggles against my grip, but it’s already too late. I have barely a handspan of travel in my wrist, but piston my fingertips like a blade into his solar plexus. The impact sends waves of shock-trauma through his chest to shatter his ribs. Bone fragments drive up through his lungs and into his heart.

He drops, choking for breath, tearing at his throat and coughing blood. The others pull back in alarm, but the chirurgeon only smiles. He bends over me, his blue eyes meeting my drug-dilated black ones.

‘Kill them all, it won’t matter,’ he says. ‘He will get what he needs from you.’

One of his scorpion-tail devices arcs up behind his shoulder. A fat droplet forms at its tip. I smell its acrid, counterseptic stink.

The tail stabs down, so fast I cannot follow.

Needle-sharp metal pierces my right eye, hot enough to vaporise the fluid within. It snaps back and my remaining eye sees the pierced orb plucked from my skull, trailing an arc of blood and a neatly severed frond of optic tissue.

Slivers of viscous fluid spill down my cheek.

‘Now we can begin,’ says the chirurgeon.

The words are spoken, the offerings made.

Blood and the foetid leavings of corpses.

The veil is weak here, worn thin by acts of intentional cruelty.

My form is formless: knotted, twisted-up screeds of violence and murder-lust. I am hate engraved on immaterial bones, a fury older than time.

Limbs unfold, foetal-soft, hardening as the bland physics of realspace effects its change.

I feel it tear, this wall that seals the way between worlds. So very thin: new-grown skin on the blade’s hard edge, but anathema to my kind.

I rip through it like a newborn clawing at its birth-caul as it fights its way out of its mother’s bloody belly, raw and screaming.

I pour through, my energies inimical to this world.

My form is dark. Smoking. Blood-hunger as a burning pattern of horror etched in the air.

I am the carrion-eaters over a slaughter-field, the murderer’s blood-fugue, the thirst of life-taking that dwells in all mortal hearts.

I need form no poisoned skin, no scales of armour; no horns to gouge, nor teeth to rend. A host body has been prepared for me, ripe to violate and make mine. His flesh is cut with the marks that turn the lock of his soul and leave it wide open.

No hapless warlock this, woefully unequipped to face the consequences of his foolishness. This is a willing host, one who has been made ready by men with understanding of such things. I can taste the power of his flesh, the strength of his heart.

Oh, the slaughters I will reap with such a form!

His fear invigorates me. He is willing perhaps, but unprepared for what his assent truly means. I will abuse the meat of his flesh, and in time I will grind his bones down to powder. And if he is not dead when I am done with him, I will discard his husked skin-sac like offal.

Even then, he will know no respite.

His mind will be broken, his flesh ruined.

His kin will shun him, will hate him for my sins.

They will burn him and salt his ashes.

And I will watch from beyond the veil for his soul when it is sent screaming over that numinous threshold for one last horror.

Such a wretched soul will be a frail, wasted thing, barely worth the attention of a Neverborn prince such as I.

But I will devour it just the same.

For hate’s sake, for spite.

He resists me now, but I tear my way inside.

Finally understanding the inescapable truth of what he has invited into his flesh, his body rebels. He cannot resist, and I pour my essence into him.

The screams of agony are delicious, rarefied, for his kind do not scream easily.

His flesh is mine now.

Click here to buy The Successors.

A Black Library Publication

‘The First Primaris’ first published in Spear of the Emperor Limited edition in 2018.
‘Legacy of Posul’ first published in White Dwarf in 2021.
‘Son of the Storm World’ first published in White Dwarf in 2019.
First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2022 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 Sanjin Halimic.

The Successors © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2022. The Successors, 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.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-619-3

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