Angel of Fire

Macharius looked upon the daemon. The daemon gazed back. My glance flickered from one to the other. Drake moved up beside Macharius. Sweat rolled down his brow. Tears of blood dripped from his eyes. He seemed caught up in some invisible spiritual struggle beyond my understanding. All around people were screaming and vomiting and tearing at their own eyes with their nails as if trying to gouge them from their sockets. There was no pattern to it, save that they all seemed to be people who had come with him. Among the Guard I saw men in the uniforms of sanctioned psykers doing the same.

Even the inquisitor’s mighty will was not up to breaking the daemon’s spell. Macharius stood silently, seeing whatever vision the daemon had put in his mind, wrestling with whatever gigantic temptations it offered him.

All of our men were rapt in a mystical trance, just as much as the heretics who had summoned the daemon. Men knelt weeping, some caught fire and turned to ash and fell leaving only outlines of dust on the ground. Some howled the praises of the Angel and abased themselves grovelling. Blood streamed from the nostrils of the righteous and unrighteous alike. It was not just our men who were falling and burning. The same thing was happening among the Sons of the Flame.

I knew that I stood at the centre of some great swirl of events, that the consequences of what happened here would ripple out through the sector and eventually the galaxy, that worlds would live and worlds would burn in consequence of it.

Macharius looked up at the daemon. ‘I refuse you!’ he said.

As if taking strength from that, Drake spoke the words of a great prayer, invoking the name of the Emperor. There was a ripping, tearing sensation inside my head, as if the wave of power he had unleashed was so strong that even I could sense it. As suddenly as it had come over us the daemonic spell was lifted. We were purged of the influence of the unclean.

I raised my shotgun to my shoulder, took careful aim and fired at the High Priest. The sound of the shot was shockingly loud in the ominous silence. The chief heretic’s head exploded in a cloud of blood and brains. In that moment, all hell broke loose.

The swirling essence of the daemon descended upon the corpse of the High Priest. The body slowly rose, one eye dangling from an optic nerve torn from its exposed skull. The other was filled with fire. Great flaming wings emerged from his back, a sword of fire appeared in his hands. His ruined corpse had become the vessel of the Angel. Some of the sense of terrible presence was gone.

‘It has not fully manifested,’ Drake shouted. ‘It cannot draw on its full power. We can still overcome it.’

I was not sure I believed him.

The corpse advanced towards us. The flesh of the right cheek had been ripped away to expose grinning teeth. It looked evil and terrible and filled with awful wrath. Macharius raced to meet it, chainsword screaming in his hand. The daemon parried the blow with its weapon. It seemed impossible something so insubstantial could parry a weapon as solid as a chainsword but it did. It struck back, blade flickering forwards impossibly fast, a line of fire searing Macharius’s cheek.

Drake and his psykers started to chant then. A glow surrounded Macharius, of the sort you see depicted in religious paintings of the Emperor and his primarchs. It was the first time I had ever seen it in reality. I swear a halo of light had appeared around Macharius’s head. He looked like a saint made flesh, which was in its way reassuring; to survive this we were going to need the assistance of a saint and more even than that.

Macharius fought with the Angel of Fire. I thought I heard something over the roar of battle and the chant of plainsong. I realised it was Drake. He was shouting: ‘Kill the priests!’

We waded in among the heretics, stabbing and bludgeoning and shooting. I have never considered it honourable to murder unarmed men but in this case I was prepared to make an exception. The priests screamed and died. The air where the Angel had been swirled; looking up I saw what appeared to be a hole in the fabric of our reality, a gateway to somewhere else, to whatever distant, Chaotic realm the Angel had come from.

All I seemed to see were swirling colours, flames dancing in all manner of strange patterns and bearing a resemblance to whatever real-world objects my mind projected on to them. They took on shape, like those castles you sometimes see when staring into a fire. I saw molten landscapes over which rose citadels sculpted from flame and around which fluttered hosts of fire-winged angels. They were assembling themselves into disciplined regiments and preparing to jump the gap to our world.

I tore my gaze away from that portal into an alternative reality and I saw that Macharius was still engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the avatar of the Angel of Fire. As ever, he moved with blazing quickness. His motion was a blur, too fast to be followed easily with the human eye. It did not appear as if the daemon had any trouble doing so.

The Angel parried Macharius’s blade with its sword of fire. If anything, its attacks were even faster than the general’s. I was surprised that anything could live when faced by the full fury of its onslaught. Every time that fiery blade licked out it seemed to impact upon the general’s armour. And yet, Macharius did not burn. It took me some time to realise why. He was being protected by the power of our own psykers.

As ever, Macharius had a very sound grasp of the situation. Of course, in all likelihood, he knew no more about how to deal with it than I did. On the other hand, he knew that there was someone present who did.

‘Close that infernal portal before it is too late.’ Drake heard and obeyed.

Lines of light began to emerge from all of the Imperial psykers and converge upon the stalwart figure of the inquisitor. He did something with all that power, channelling it into a mesh of potent energy that swirled outwards from his hands and surrounded the glowing gate. He began to pull the net tight. The opening started to close but not without resistance.

Men screamed and I wondered what was happening because there was a note in the screams that I had never heard before. The psykers around Drake started to fall, their mouths open, their faces pale, blood gushing from mouths and nostrils and eye-sockets. It was not the same sound as the heretics made as they were slaughtered, it was something else, the sound of men who were losing their very souls, having them drawn from their bodies and offered up as a sacrifice to something greater.

Beams of light emerged from Drake’s hand and surged around the gateway, forming a lattice around it. His whole body was lit by the energies he wielded. His eyes blazed with the Emperor’s Light. Every one of the people who still communed with Drake stood frozen. Their eyes were wide, their mouths stretched in ghastly rictuses as if screams were being torn from their very souls. One by one, they toppled and died as if their life force was being wrenched from them and used to power whatever exorcism Drake performed.

The daemon began to oppose the inquisitor’s efforts and tried to get past Macharius in order to cut him down with its fiery blade. Macharius kept himself interposed. He stood between it and Drake. Seeing the Lord High Commander at risk, more and more of our soldiers pressed forwards. The Angel chopped down but it could not find a way through that wall of flesh that opposed it. What human courage and human muscle could achieve our soldiers did. They wanted to protect Macharius even at the cost of their own lives. They threw themselves forwards, again and again forming a rampart of blood and gristle. I saw Anton and Ivan struggle to get forwards. They were almost within striking distance of the Angel when I lost sight of them in the press.

I sensed the change in the atmosphere around us. Where once there was a wind of power blowing outwards into our world, now it felt as if the current was flowing in a different direction. All of the fire and energy seemed to be being sucked out of the air around us and returned to the place from which it had come, and as it did so I could see that the Angel of Fire was being drawn back into its own fiery realm. It fought every step of the way but, at last, it passed through the portal and that eerie gateway swirled shut.

And then suddenly, it was silent. The Angel of Fire was gone. The portal was closed, leaving only a strange shimmering in the air that vanished even as we watched. Drake stood surrounded by bodies. In the ultimate crisis his bodyguard of psykers had laid down their lives and more to protect him and to close the way through which the daemon had come. The high inquisitor looked wearier than any man I had ever seen. His shoulders slumped, his eyes were half-closed, he had aged a couple of decades in as many minutes. Macharius walked over to him and said something, I have no idea what.

I looked around to see what had become of my friends. Ivan lay on the ground clutching at his arm. Half his face seemed to have melted and I could tell from the set of his eyes that he was in pain. Anton knelt beside him, offering him liquor from a flask. The New Boy stood guard over them both, his lasgun held tight in his white-knuckled hands. The Understudy was beside him. His expression was as blank as ever. The titanic events we had just witnessed did not seem to have left a mark on his psyche.

My eyes kept tracking round looking for danger. There did not seem to be any. Few heretics remained and those that did seemed to have lost all will to fight. More and more of our troops entered the sanctum. Their faces wore a relieved expression as if they understood the fate we had so narrowly avoided.

I strode over to Anton and Ivan. ‘How is it going?’

‘We’re alive,’ Anton said.

Ivan just gurgled in pain. He looked up at me as if he desperately wanted to say something. I leaned in to hear what it was he had to say.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘Tell that bastard Anton that if he does not stop standing on my hand, I will cut his nadgers off!’

Looking down I could see that one of Anton’s heavy boots was indeed on Ivan’s fleshly hand. I pushed him off. At this point the Guardsmen present started chanting Macharius’s name. It started slowly and softly at first, but it grew louder and it was taken up by all of the Guard present, the word rolling like thunder down the stairwell and echoing through the cathedral. It seemed as if the chant was taken up by the entire army. The stones themselves vibrated to the name and it seemed as if the word would echo out from the world of Karsk and across the galaxy.

I suppose it did. The High Commander’s name became a battle-cry that would ring out down the years and across thousands of worlds. He would change the destiny of our sector and the Imperium and I suppose it all started there. If I close my eyes, I can still picture the scene so clearly, and hear the word echo through my bones like a prophecy of triumph and doom: ‘Macharius. Macharius! MACHARIUS!’