Horusian Wars: Incarnation excerpt

The dust rolled through the dream, great billowing walls of grey dust. It was there in every breath, there gritting eyes when they blinked. The dreamer coughed and a galaxy of burning stars exploded through him. He staggered and fell to his knees. Sharp stones ground beneath him. Edges and points dug into his skin. He reached down and picked up a handful of stones and lifted them up so that they were in front of his eyes. He blinked and the dust flowed and sucked into his eyes. Then it cleared, and he saw. They were not stones in his hands; they were bones, broken and dry.

He gave a muffled cry as he dropped them, and was about to rise when the dust cloud peeled back in front of him. A land lay before him. No, not a land, a city, but a city like nothing he had ever seen or dreamed. Towers and battlements and domes rose like mountain ranges. Statues as tall as cathedral spires reached up to the shrouded sky. The dust wind blew through the avenues and peeled over the faces of the statues and battlements.

‘Help…’ He turned at the voice. A man sat on a stone chair three paces behind him. The chair was plain and grey, its surface pitted by the wind. The man that sat on it wore grey, the fabric so worn that it seemed as though the dust had settled in a thin skin on top of his wasted flesh and bones. There were wounds in the flesh, too, scabbed and blackened gashes that wept slow tears of pus. ‘I… Help…’ the enthroned man said again, shifting his head, shivering with fatigue.

‘I…’ began the dreamer. ‘I… who are you? What are you? This is a dream, isn’t it?’

‘It…’ coughed the figure on the throne. ‘It can’t go on. I…’

‘What can’t go on? What are you talking about?’ he asked, but the wasted figure only shook its head. Then he laughed and somewhere behind the curtain of dust a growl of thunder answered. ‘Why am I even speaking? You’re just a sleep phantom. This is a dream, and somewhere…’ His words faltered. He blinked, pain and panic flashing through his eyes. ‘I am dying…’ Iacto said softly. ‘I am bleeding out on the floor of a chapel.’ He laughed again, but the sound was low and cold and the thunder did not answer. ‘All that time, all those years climbing in rank and manoeuvring for power, and this is the end I was reaching for – a fever dream on the edge of an abyss.’

‘I…’ said the figure in the stone chair, and raised its hand.

The city around them moaned as the wind pulled the dust of powdered bones through its streets.

‘Iacto.’

His head jerked around. The figure in the stone chair was looking at him, gaze steady, eyes clear in its wasted face. It held out its hand, skeletal fingers open. The figure twitched and for an instant Iacto felt as though its pain had whipped through him too. He gasped and staggered, falling to his knees.

Black voids of pain and fatigue, and endless screaming nightmare opened in him, night eternal and dark and laughing, and he was alone, alone as the dark and cold closed in, growling like wolves hungry for meat in winter, and he could hear the rattle and hiss of them and hear their breath as they licked the air, and he felt the weakness in his limbs as he rose to beat them back.

Then the pain fled, and the dream was of the dead city once more.

‘Why?’ he said, at last, and the wind snatched the word away. ‘There are other people, other people dying. Other people who are better. Other…’

The wind was rising. Dust had swallowed the city. Somewhere in the distance beyond this dream his heart was beating the last of his blood. He looked up, trying to breathe, trying to stay alive.

The figure on the throne was a fading blur, its hand still held out.

‘Iacto,’ it said again.

He wanted to cry. He wanted to shout. He wanted to do anything but reach out to that hand. And he heard a question rise in him, the last question that he thought would come to his lips.

‘Will…’ He coughed. ‘Will it mean something?’

‘Please…’

Iacto laughed one last time and reached up to take the proffered hand.