Auric Gods

Chapter Four The Imperial Palace, The Dark Cells, Terra

Even the echo of his steps felt wrong. At first they would reverberate in a seemingly endless refrain, only to cease abruptly and fall still and heavy like footfalls in a sound-deadened room.

Varogalant ignored it. Clasping Vigilance to his chest, like a standard-bearer drawing strength from the colours of his regiment, he maintained his watch. He passed another of his order, the warrior lost momentarily to the creeping shadows, his sable-black armour blending with the dark.

Varogalant nodded once, solemn, and saw the gesture returned. No words were exchanged. Few words were ever spoken in this place. But listen. Oh, yes, they would all listen. Silence prevailed at first, but only at first. Then the half-heard voices would drift through the iron-grey corridors in languages older than mankind itself. Try to attend, to fathom the nature of the imparted message, and the silence would fall again like a dolorous veil. Deafening, absolute… until the voices returned, at the barest edge of hearing. Lesser men would have been driven to madness.

The voices belonged to the eldritch creatures, to the horrors and grotesques, to the macabre and the profane. Not all had flesh, not all were truly alive, but every wretched thing incarcerated behind the wards and santic circles, the rune-locked gates, the binding chains, the null cages and obviation charms possessed anima.

Varogalant could feel it trying to worm in, to unpick the mental fastness he had raised around his mind. Every cell and oubliette held an abomination, a thing so terrible that it could not be killed or destroyed – either because no known method of annihilation had been found or because it was unknown if the very act of dissolution would unleash a greater calamity.

Remnants of Old Night, when the galaxy was swallowed by darkness and humanity stood alone, ignorant and afraid, these things went beyond evil and only the Dark Cells could keep them. Here, where menace as thick as blood lay on the air, even the warders, the grim-faced Shadowkeepers, felt unease.

Varogalant strode on, ignoring the wailing, the whispered promises and sanity-eroding imprecations. The light maintained a constant struggle against the dark down here, the sodium braziers flickering weakly and barely holding back the encroaching shadow. Mechanicus adepts, the greatest Martian minds, had tried to engineer lumens capable of cutting through the darkness but no power augment or fuel source could touch it. Even arcane methods of illumination had been found wanting, though they fared better than any technological solution. The darkness reigned, its dominion almost absolute.

Varogalant kept his eyes open, disavowing the half-glimpsed phantasms at the edge of sight. His nerves felt exposed, raw, as if the slightest touch would send them into spasm. Here, even the Custodians gave pause.

Marshalling his resolve, Varogalant came upon the chamber he sought. Much like the others, the chamber had a marking on the wall next to it, a simple numeric code that belied the nature of what it harboured. Its door stood open, a reminder of his failure. The gloom inside beckoned but he refused it. Even in absence, the thing that had once been held here had a presence. Like an unquiet spirit, it seemed to haunt the room, which was scarcely ten feet across and the same deep. The ceiling was high enough to admit the Custodian should he choose to enter. He did not. A void held him back, a space both unoccupied and occupied at the same time.

Poised at the threshold, Varogalant lowered Vigilance and pointed the guardian spear’s scythe-like blade towards the dingy cell, as if he could impale the memory of what it had contained. He closed his eyes… and was assailed by visions.

A great leviathan, slowly uncoiling from a heady brume, its malice suffocating…

A skeletal effigy, its horns reaching into the night and the screams of sacrifices heavy on blood-misted air…

A cage of lightning, a cruciform figure silhouetted within, the forks tearing slits in reality…

When he opened his eyes again, he had fallen to one knee. His heart pounded, breath sawed through his mouth. Varogalant gripped the haft of Vigilance and used it to push himself back up. It anchored him for long enough that he threw off the insidious darkness.

Then he turned, his back to the opening, and slammed the spear’s ferule against the floor. It made no sound beyond a deadened thud.

The shame weighed heavy, but he bore the burden, as they all did.

The open door behind him served as a reminder of their collective failing. It was not the only one.

Other Shadowkeepers stood before similar doorways.

For thousands of years, the Dark Cells had remained inviolate until the Maledictum, the Rift.

The black iron halls ran deep, bored into Terra’s bedrock, and sealed during the time of Unity. There they remained, the vigil of the Shadowkeepers undisturbed until the day the Neverborn returned to the Throneworld. Such was the unfolding crisis that every shield host was mustered and the black-armoured sentinels were sent above ground with only the barest handful of warriors left behind.

It was desperate, a panic not seen since the Siege.

By the time they realised what had happened it was far too late.

Borsa Thursk gave the order to retreat, leaving the survival of other shield hosts in serious doubt as they faced the daemonic hordes alone. He had erred, in the order to fall back and the one that preceded it, which had seen the Shadowkeepers take to the field. Upon their return, they found two things: those they had left behind dead, slain in ways too horrible to utter, and several of the cells empty, the method of their contents’ escape or theft impossible to fathom.

In seeking to avert one calamity, the Shadowkeepers believed they had turned a blind eye to another that had then come to pass.

A great and exhaustive search followed as the Shadowkeepers hurled themselves into the void, chasing every scrap of rumour and evidence that would see these terrors placed back under lock and key.

Some had been recovered, but not all. The diaspora went far, had no discernible pattern and presented a nigh-on impossible task.

It was the single bleakest moment in all of Varogalant’s long memory.

But he did remember.

He remembered the Lion’s Gate. He remembered Borsa Thursk bellowing for the shield host to return and the harrowing that followed when the Shadowkeepers realised they had been undone.

And he remembered Adio, and how he had left his brother to die. In the end, it had been for nothing. The old relics, the creatures that once haunted Old Night, they were loose and they could be anywhere.