Mortarion's colossal monologue

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

A LIGHT IN THE GARDEN

For a moment, there was nothing but blackness.

‘Do you feel it, brother?’ Mortarion’s voice was a gloating hush that came from nowhere. ‘Do you feel the warp?’

Pain returned and Guilliman roared. His skin was on fire. His bones felt like ice. His organs were a hundred stab wounds. He was falling, tumbling over and over, into some nameless darkness.

‘Do not fight it, my brother,’ breathed Mortarion, and his voice seemed to be right by his ear. ‘Accept it, and Grandfather will spare you. You could join me. Together, we could overthrow our other brothers, cast down their false gods, and bring the galaxy the endless renewal of death and rebirth.’

Guilliman could not reply. Pain attacked him on every level, each part of his being suffered.

‘It hurts, yes?’ said Mortarion’s voice. He sounded almost regretful it was not he who was afflicted.

Guilliman dug deep inside himself, to some small corner that the pain had not yet found.

There was a light there. He fled into it.

His awareness shifted, and he was two people, two versions of himself at two different times.

The gate to the throne room was before him.

‘This is interesting,’ said Mortarion’s voice. ‘This is a memory you hide in. You went to see father? You want Him to protect you now? How touching.’

Guilliman, still tongueless, lipless, wordless, could only relive what he had seen. Trajann Valoris bade the great doors open. His words were a jumble, broken by time, his movements a fan of overlapping images in terrible shades of gold.

But when the gates opened, and the light came out, that was pure.

Mortarion gasped in discomfort, and Guilliman felt a little hope.

He remembered. He relived. He had gone in to see what his father had become. Guilliman had been thousands of years dead. He had spent subjective years lost in the warp to come to Terra, only to find an empire of ruin laid starkly before his disbelieving eyes.

All building to this fateful moment.

There was light and fury, a radiance that passed through the bones and burned at the soul. Endless sound that filled eternities.

There were the wordless screams of the psykers drained to feed His terrible majesty.

There were visions of gods, and demigods, of a brown-skinned man of calm expression. Clad in skins. Clad in mail. Clad in clothes of all colours and bewildering variety. Clad in armour of gold. He had many faces, all proud, all betrayed. He saw Malcador in him, the first regent. He saw his brothers.

A million ideas battered him, memories from tens of thousands of years of existence. Random, circular trains of thought, obsessions, predictions and fears. So many voices, all the same, all different, none coherent.

He saw a dusty room, titanic in scale, crammed with machinery of awful purpose, the living dying in relay to sustain this monstrous thing. The centre was a machine of gold, shrouded in the dust of broken dreams. A skull-faced cadaver, all life gone, perched within its seat – but then the vision flickered, and he saw a king of infinite power, resting awhile upon His throne to think, only lost to His subjects for a while, and when done with His meditation He would rise, and rule justly. He saw a tired man who would be his father, giving him grave counsel he could not hear, telling him what he must do. Again, his view changed, and he saw an evil force to rival the great powers of Chaos. He saw sorrow, triumph, failure, loss and potential. There was no one face among all the faces, no one voice, but a chorus, a cacophony. The Emperor’s presence was a hammer blow to his soul, a tremendous scouring of being. He could not stand before it, and fell to his knees, though Valoris remained silent by his side as if nothing had happened.

He was in the dust of a corpse-king’s court. He was before a resplendent Emperor for all the ages.

‘Father,’ he said, and when he had said that word, it was the last time he had meant it. ‘Father, I have returned.’ Guilliman forced himself to look up into the pillar of light, the screaming of souls, the empty-eyed skull, the impassive god, the old man, yesterday’s saviour. ‘What must I do? Help me, father. Help me save them.’

In the present, in the past, he felt Mortarion’s wordless presence at his side, and felt his fallen brother’s horror.

He looked at the Emperor of Mankind, and could not see. Too much, too bright, too powerful. The unreality of the being before him stunned him to the core. A hundred different impressions, all false, all true, raced through his mind.

He could not remember what his father had looked like, before, and Roboute Guilliman forgot nothing.

And then, that thing, that terrible, awful thing upon the Throne, saw him.

‘My son,’ it said.

‘Thirteen,’ it said.

‘Lord of Ultramar.’

‘Saviour.’

‘Hope.’

‘Failure.’

‘Disappointment.’

‘Liar.’

‘Thief.’

‘Betrayer.’

‘Guilliman.’

He heard all these at once. He did not hear them at all. The Emperor spoke and did not speak. The very idea of words seemed ridiculous, the concept of them a grievous harm against the equilibrium of time and being.

‘Roboute Guilliman.’ The raging tempest spoke his name, and it was as the violence a dying sun rains upon its worlds. ‘Guilliman. Guilliman. Guilliman.’

The name echoed down the wind of eternity, never ceasing, never reaching its intended point. The sensation of many minds reached out to Guilliman, violating his senses as they tried to commune, but then one mind seemed to come from the many, a raw, unbounded power, and gave wordless commands to go out and save what they built together. To destroy what they made. To save his brothers, to kill them. Contradictory impulses, all impossible to disobey, all the same, all different.

Futures many and terrible raced through his mind, the results of all these things, should he do any, all or none of them.

‘Father!’ he cried.

Thoughts battered him.

‘A son.’

‘Not a son.’

‘A thing.’

‘A name.’

‘Not a name.’

‘A number. A tool. A product.’

A grand plan in ruins. An ambition unrealised. Information, too much information, coursed through Guilliman: stars and galaxies, entire universes, races older than time, things too terrifying to be real, eroding his being like a storm in full spate carves knife-edged gullies into badlands.

‘Please, father!’ he begged.

‘Father, not a father. Thing, thing, thing,’ the minds said.

‘Apotheosis.’

‘Victory.’

‘Defeat.’

‘Choose,’ it said.

‘Fate.’

‘Future.’

‘Past.’

‘Renewal. Despair. Decay.’

And then, there seemed to be focusing, as of a great will exerting itself, not for the final time, but nearly for the final time. A sense of strength failing. A sense of ending. Far away, he heard arcane machines whine and screech, close to collapse, and the clamour of screams of dying psykers that underpinned everything in that horrific room rising higher in pitch and intensity.

‘Guilliman.’ The voices overlaid, overlapped, became almost one, and Guilliman had a fleeting memory of a sad face that had seen too much, and a burden it could barely countenance. ‘Guilliman, hear me.

‘My last loyal son, my pride, my greatest triumph.’

How those words burned him, worse than the poisons of Mortarion, worse than the sting of failure. They were not a lie, not entirely. It was worse than that.

They were conditional.

‘My last tool. My last hope.’

A final drawing in of power, a thought expelled like a dying breath.

‘Guilliman…’

It felt to Guilliman like his mind had exploded. There was a blinding flash, and the king and the corpse and the old man overlaid and overlapped, dead and alive, divine and mortal. All judged him. Guilliman staggered from the throne room. Valoris stared into the heart of the Emperor’s light unflinchingly a moment longer, then turned away and followed.

They emerged days later, though only seconds had passed. Guilliman could not be sure of anything that had happened. When asked later, Valoris said he saw nothing but light, and had heard nothing, and that nobody had heard anything from the Emperor since He had taken to the Golden Throne thousands of years before, but he said he had seen Guilliman speak, as if deep in discussion, and although Valoris could not hear what was discussed Guilliman seemed serene and firm. That he had not seen him fall, or plead.

Every time he remembered, it was different. Was any of it real? He did not know. He would never know.

The moment fled back into the past where it belonged. Guilliman’s body slammed into wet soil. He was dying again. His soul clung on, but that too was being eaten alive by Mortarion’s plague.

Footsteps halted by his head. There was a poke on the breastplate of the Armour of Fate. Guilliman heard Mortarion speak, but he could not see, and he could sense nothing else but pain.

‘Do you see, Guilliman, you follow the wrong master,’ said Mortarion. ‘He is a cyst, a pus-filled canker surrounding a dead thing lodged in the fabric of reality, like a thorn, or a piece of shrapnel. It must be drawn out for things to heal. Do you understand now, that this is what you follow?’ Mortarion grunted in amusement. ‘Of course, you can’t answer. I doubt you understand, anyway.’

There was the sound of Mortarion shifting his stance. A wistful tone entered his voice.

‘We will soon be in the Garden of Nurgle, my brother. The veils are parting. I can see it already. Once you are dead, this world will fall within it, and become a jewel of decay. You have damaged my network, but not by enough, and at the coming of your death, one by one each of your worlds will pass from this place of cold void and uncaring stars into the Grand­father’s embrace.

‘I wish you could see it. It is beautiful, full of life and potential. There are trees here, and plants of amazing variety. It is not barren. It is not like that cold light you showed me. Not like Him. It is not like the materium at all, with its pointless struggle against inevitability. Here nothing every truly ends, but is reborn and dies and is reborn and dies, over and over again. Everything here is given many gifts. Nothing, no matter how small, is overlooked, and all share in Grandfather’s bounties. There is no pain, and because there is no pain suffering is borne gladly. Now tell me, brother, compared to the hell our father has inflicted upon the galaxy, does that sound so terrible?’ He took a deep breath, a man sampling country air on a fine day. ‘I wish you could see it,’ he said again.

The pain still raged through Guilliman, but it was diminishing.

‘If only you would turn. You are nearly dead. Soon the pain will be over.’ Mortarion knelt beside his brother, and rested his hand on his chest. ‘Don’t you want that, for it to be done?’ He began to stroke, like he was soothing a feverish child. ‘Hush now, Roboute. Hush. Go to the Grandfather, and you will see, he will make it all all right. He will take the pain away forever.’