Dreaming in Viric

[Don Isaac]

It was not grass that bent beneath his boots, not wind that ran across his warplate, and it was definitively not reality that surrounded him. Luscious stands of too-green grass blew in the opposite direction of the wind, while the leaves of the trees wafted in another, stands of massive mahoganies looming overhead, flourishing in a tropical environment that seems to have never known rain, simply the same summer day, repeated endlessly. A soporific haze drifted through the woods, the atmosphere cloying as it filtered through the rust-stained punctures within his helmet.

So be it. This was not Okor's first walk down stranger paths.

The earth beneath him was like a tarpaulin, reality bending and warping with every step, alternating between buoying him upwards and sucking him downwards, as if there was some deeper, danker hell that was beckoning him into its depths. Each step was a stumble, his ceramite-shrouded carrion cascading forwards, always a single moment from falling into a heap of rusted metal and eternally decaying flesh.

His claws carved their way into a thankfully sturdy trunk, corroded digits skinning the bark, the mossy hide peeling off the still-living bark as he anchored himself in the trunk, viscous sap oozing over his gauntlets. Desiccated and desecrated lungs heaved within his chest, the cancerous bone of his ribcage straining to contain his beating hearts. He was endless, eternal, unceasing- and so, ironically, there was little reason not to recollect himself- stop to smell the roses, as it were.

The weird-winds at his back, his claws curled, drawing the bark up for closer inspection. Fractal patterns of moss grew upon the exterior, spiraling growths that faded into a green haze at their terminus- the detail slipping into some other dimension in search of the geometric perfection that could not be attained upon this limited realm. Gnarled bones ground against each other in his wrist as he twisted the material, turning his blighted eyes upon its opposite.

Seven days after the serpent moon sets- when the first mother's blood returns to her birthplace - when a weed overgrows the tree of life- prophecies were writ palimpsest upon the bark, overlapping omens scrawled in a steady hand, regardless of what other promise of the future laid in their trajectory. Dozens of destinies grew within this tree, spiraling about its trunk, following its disparate branches with every twist and turn of the timeline. What might I learn if I flayed it?

The thought was a tempting one- to walk this world on a path that you had paved long in advance, every step predestined to lead towards some great fate. But he pushed off the tree and took his next step into the unknown at a leisurely pace, the futures he had glimpsed falling from his festering fingers. He did not need a seer's knowledge to foresee what the inevitabilities of this world were.

Eyes as bright and red as rubies watched him depart, emerald scales coiling about the high canopies as the diseased devotee strode on, leaving distortion in his wake. His very passage and perception altered the landscape, the pristine dreams shifting with each step, fungal blooms and rampant growth blooming about him. Corpse-flowers blossomed beneath the boughs of trees whose leaves offered no true shade- light filtered through them, creating twisted reflections of whatever their light touched, the wafting breeze causing carnivorous flora to become thorned roses as the refracted sun cast its light across its putrescent petals.

Everything rots. He did not need to be an Oracle to foresee that primordial truth.

 

[Don Isaac]

His armoured knees sank into the black earth as a memory echoed in the back of his mutated skull. A lazy river drifted before him, the banks shored up by mutant mangroves, their botanical tendrils seething through the soil like snakes as they held the border firm.

He'd been here before.

Perhaps not at this river, but this shore- he'd nearly drowned on it not long ago, the waters dragging him downwards and propelling him over an edge. Twisted vertebrae cracked as he looked to the side, following the lazy bends of the rivers as it navigated between stands of ancient trees, their gnarled branches reaching skyward as if seeking to claw down the clouds and hoard that misty nimbus about themselves.

The waters flowingly languidly past him was no mortal stream- it was dark and deep, a chill emanating from its currents that threatened to leech the eternal life from his bones even from here. And the things that were cast adrift upon that river-

Shattered helmets rusted into little more than hunks of oxygenated iron were cradled in the twists of roots, like fruits growing upon malformed branches, plump and ready for harvest. Manuscripts floated down the current like fallen leaves, their pages refusing to moulder as their leather covers bore silvery inscriptions in a language that even he, in all his years of crusading, had never born witness to.

This was a graveyard- the waters of Lethe. There was no place of honour here for legacies long-dead, no names carved defiant upon the bark or dead hands clutching blades in one last act of stubborn strength.

This was a place for the forgotten.

This could not be his fate- no. He had bartered away his mortality twice over, in millennia past. His breath caught in his tumorous throat, his ragged lungs seizing as the lambent glow of his eyes beneath his helmet turned towards the detritus of desolate lives. And nestled within those fragments of forgotten histories- there.

Hands that had strangled demigods reached out, febrile and trembling as he plunged his corroded gauntlet into the mass of roots, carefully avoiding the mystic waters flowing beneath him, what rusted flakes that landed within that dark abyss sinking beneath, never to be seen. His fingers touched metal- wrapping around verdigris-cloaked bronze, he heaved, cracking roots as they reluctantly surrendered his prize.

He clutched the tarnished treasure close to his armoured chest, only pulling it away to investigate it closer after seven slow, shuddering beats of his hearts.

It was a bell- an ancient one, an antique from a time and place long lost to the tides of fate. He recognized it- how could he not? The tolling of that bell had been his childhood companion, the signal to flee from the fields, clutching his simple sickle close, and to cower beneath its questionable aegis. There'd always been losses, deaths- he'd lost both parents but a week after he could take solids.

How had he forgotten? The weight of aeons laid heavily across his shoulders. With meditation, numerology, and time, he could remember the details of what he had performed over the ages in the service of his brothers, his Father, and his God- the names of the slain, the fortresses over which he had raised the ragged banner of the legion. But this- this was his childhood- the brief larval stage before he had exchanged his mortal flesh for a carapace of ceramite and adamantium.

It was a time of… fear. His child heart, still lonely in his breast, hammering against ribs that could be snapped to flinders with but a simple touch, dreading the walking dead beyond the meager walls of his village. Adrift on the tides of fate, frantically scrabbling for the shore in hopes of changing his destiny. He hardly feared death, now- his fate was in the hands of The Leprous Lord. His death would come at a time when God chose, when his gifts failed, and he was given the chance to breath his last, infectious breath and bleed his contaminated blood over fertile soil.

He let the talisman of his last life fall, casting it into the tides of the river once more, to drift eternal. He was immortal flotsam, carried upon these errant currents to where he was needed.

Slowly, he clambered to his feet, armoured joints screeching in protest as his own bones groaned under the strain.

Then let us see where the tide takes me.

He stepped forward into the dark waters, and dropped like a stone.

 

[Don Isaac]

The abyssal darkness surrounded Okor. The chill sunk deep into his body, freezing his mummified flesh and turning his marrow to a rotten frost. The dark lenses sunk into his helmet started to crack, hairline fractures spreading across tempered glass as he took a pre-emptive breath of stagnant air.

As his descent continued, the pressure built- but as it bit deep into his flesh, he recognized it for what it was. He was not being crushed by the sheer weight of the black waters around him, but he was being crushed by the weight of aeons that coursed through this sorrowful stream.

His eyes forced themselves to stare upon the bleak world around him, even as cursed water beaded along the cracks upon his helmet. And what wonders there were.

The ruined hulks of battleships, bearing the heraldry of nascent Empires never to be, drifted upon subsurface currents like cetacean leviathans making their post-mortem pilgrimage to the seabed. He recognized some of them- the shattered crystalline hull of an insectoid race that had been crushed beneath the company that would come to be known as Mortarion's Anvil, the black-and-gunmetal of the Iron Hands, the shattered half-robotic bodies of their Legionnaires spilling into the absent atmosphere of Istvaan V.

He recognized them- he'd been there for their destruction, their consignment into the dustbin of history.

Deeper, now- a lens shattered further, a pressurized spray of lethian water hissing against his dead flesh. There was no point in worrying about its effects- it had inundated him already, the fanged rent in his gut swallowing it greedily. But past the cracks, flickering lights fed by reactors that had been still and silent for millennia illuminated rusting hulks.

Pilgrim ships, this time- refitted cargo freighters that carried bellyfulls of the faithful across the void of space and through the corrosive otherworld that welcomed the opportunity to wager souls against interstellar travel. Fresh converts for a truer faith, labourers for the pox-forges and sacrifices to open the gate between realms and welcome the Grandfather's servants into reality. They were becalmed, now- barely-armoured shells cracked open as its precious cargo was dragged kicking and screaming into what they would eventually come to regard as their salvation.

This was the fruits of his eternal crusade. An endless war for the future of Humanity, waged across a million worlds. What had he created over the millennia?

Carrion.

The countless hands of the dead, cast down by his hand, reached up from the darkness. Skeletal fingers wafted in the currents, shifting like macabre seaweed as they rose ever-upwards, seeking their killer. There were the reformed bones of others like him- children pried free from their mortal destinies and made into superhuman Killers. Some were warped by mutation, others bore grinning, squat skulls decorated with the service studs of Imperial counterparts. Fathomless legions of others were simply human- women, children, warriors who still had the rotting remnants of uniforms clutching to their grasping hands. Some killed with bolter and blade, some simply the casualties of the unfortunate fact that not every soul could withstand the Grandfather's Gifts.

They were all there, waiting for him. His victims, his offerings, his afterthoughts. His Captain had kept a tally of his bloody work throughout the millennia, but he had lacked the… esoteric faculties to keep such a count. He could earnestly say he had lost count during the days of the Great Crusade, serving beneath the now-cursed Aquilla, and the festering fingers that now reached up to claim him had Millennia to add to their sum.

There was only one thing he could do, as those necrotizing digits wrapped around his armoured ankles.

He grasped a decaying hand within his own corroded gauntlet, dragging that decrepit mass upwards as he embraced it. It was impossible to tell what it once was. Man, woman, astartes, or alien, death had made it little more than osseous matter sheathed in a necrotic slime. It was his kin, made equal in entropy.

"Brother," two mouths whispered at once, in the same voice.

His lenses shattered. The darkness flooded in.

 

[Kopaka]

And there, within the whirling entropy, there came a new voice. It was not the sort of warbling, resonant boom of a chaos nightmare.

Something was cutting into his dream; a piercing, crystalline note that stirred distant memories. The voice said this:

"Wwwwweeeeeeee...sssseeeeeeee...yyoooouuuuuu..."

Then, the darkness shattered, and Okor was left standing on a milky-white plain of blasted granite rubble. Above him towered an immense obelisk, with a single, glowing glyph etched into its face.

A spiked triangle, with long rays descending from a central eye. The sigil of Asuryan.