The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,79
Another towering veil of dust rose up on the far side of the canyon, lit from within by fresh detonations. The overlapping sonic roar became blistering, overwhelming even my aural receptors and making my vision shake.
I stared out west, over to where the processional avenue led towards the Lion’s Gate. As steeled as I was, as conditioned as I was, I could hardly credit the evidence of my senses. For a terrible moment, caught in that seismic upheaval, I lost any sense of location, of secure grounding. The primordial centre had been cut loose.
The Terra I knew was gone. Gouts of hissing flame burst up from the transitways and the deep canyons, licking the sides of the tottering spires. The blazes were impossibly huge, merged conflagrations that thundered into the airless heights. I could just make out the wall on the far side of the heat-shaken night, blurry from the boiling clouds of burning ash. I could see the pinnacles of the basilicas thrusting skywards like ebony spears. The skies themselves had ignited, aching with fell illumination and riven by the bellowing of inhuman voices. I saw dozens of great edifices, all thousands of years old, dissolve into blackened dust, broken apart by the rituals enacted at their hearts. An absolute and unearthly psychic hatred, raw and condensed into dreadful purity, flooded across the ancient battlements and towers like the gales of a crashing maelstrom.
The Grey Knights stood beside me, their armour turned deep crimson by the unholy light. Their Justicar looked impassively into the night sky.
‘Shards of Kharneth,’ he intoned, grimly. ‘So they truly dare it.’
We could see across to the old Lion’s Gate void port reaches – huge expanses of rockcrete landing stages and command towers, interwoven with deep chasms where the ship-lifts waited. Even in normal times it was a desolate place, marked for reverence by the Ecclesiarchy and left bare for the winds to scrape against, but now it was a diabolic vision of torment. The great adamantium plates were heaving. Columns of liquid incandescence spat from the ruptures, jetting high into the weeping skies above.
‘The wall,’ I said, preparing to race down from the spire’s flank.
Before I could move, however, an immense boom rang out, striking the spire-faces and shattering their armourglass viewportals. The glittering rain of shards tumbled into cataracts, refracting the crimson aura and splaying it into rivers of rubies.
Out across that immense vista, I saw the columns of flame solidify. Every point of lurid light began to intensify, thousands of them, tens of thousands, until the great plain resembled a starfield of its own, a bloody mirror to the one that cycled above the cloud barrier.
They howled as they were born. I could only watch as they ripped into instantiation, first tens, then hundreds, then more and more until the entire landscape was boiling with daemon embryos. The nightmare infants stretched out, bathed in birth-flames, their bodies extending upwards and outwards, their jaws distended in natal agony, their backs spawning spine-ridged spikes. They opened black-on-black eyes, they lashed with prehensile tongues, they staggered out of flaming cocoons, croaking from vocal cords that were already stiffening and taking up blades that erupted from firming scab-flesh.
They were in ranks. It was an infernal regiment, each one a cohort pulled from the mirror realm, burgeoning and unfolding until an entire war host stood before us. Soon I could no longer count them – a Neverborn army, filling the entire void port from end to end, spilling beyond its bounds and into the chasms and towers beyond, all lightning-crowned, all blood-slick, all screaming blasphemies at the spires of Holy Terra.
Then greater horrors burst free of the world’s shackles among them – slobbering behemoths with a hundred eyes, iron-collared hounds that slavered and yanked at their thick chains, quasi-mechanical juggernauts with burning eyes and hunched smokestacks; more and more, thrusting up from the tormented earth, exhumed amid cataclysms of fresh etherplasm.
And finally, at the very apex, unfurled the greatest of all. They tore into existence with splintered bellows that annihilated the rockcrete around them, rising up into avatars of swirling detritus, higher and higher, bloating and firming into colossi of burnished muscle and flame-blackened brass. Immense bat wings fused and pushed out and stretched and enfleshed to beat the flame-torn skies, tattered and studded with chains and swinging skull-bundles. Huge heads lifted up high, each crowned with heavy thickets of twisted horns and distended with tusk-crammed, dripping jawlines. Mighty cloven hooves stamped, breaking the ground open into