Void Stalker d'Aaron Dembski-Bowden

As requested by a bunch of people (when I offered on Wednesday), here’s the prologue to Void Stalker.

As you may have guessed from Soul Hunter and Blood Reaver, things aren’t going First Claw’s way. Behold, the beginning of the inevitable conclusion, and please remember that this is a first draft – essentially unchecked – and it may never appear in the final novel in this form.

It probably will, though. I’ll just catch any typos and sentences I’m not keen on before then.

PROLOGUE

- RAIN -

THE PROPHET AND THE murderess stood on the battlements of the dead citadel, weapons in their hands. Rain slashed in a miserable flood, thick enough to obscure vision, hissing against the stone even as it ran from the mouths of leering gargoyles to drain down the castle’s sides. Above the rain, the only audible sounds came from the two figures: one human, standing in broken armour that thrummed with static crackles; the other, an alien maiden in ancient and contoured war plate, weathered by an eternity of scarring.

‘This is where your Legion died, isn’t it?’ Her voice was modulated by the helm she wore, emerging from the death-mask’s open mouth with a curious sibilance that almost melted into the rain. ‘We call this world Shithr Vejruhk. What is it in your serpent’s tongue? Tsagualsa, yes? Answer me this, prophet. Why would you come back here?’

The prophet didn’t answer. He spat acidic blood onto the dark stone floor, and drew in another ragged breath. The sword in his hands was a cleaved ruin, its shattered blade severed halfway along its length. He didn’t know where his bolter was, and a smile crept across his split lips as he felt an instinctive tug of guilt. It was surely a sin to lose such a Legion relic.

‘Talos,’ the maiden smiled as she spoke, he could hear it in her voice. Her amusement was remarkable if only for the absence of mockery and malice. ‘Do not be ashamed, human. Everyone dies.’

The prophet sank to one knee, blood leaking from the cracks in his armour. His attempt at speech left his lips as a grunt of pain. The only thing he could smell was the chemical reek of his own injuries.

The maiden came closer, even daring to rest the scythe-bladed tip of her spear on the wounded warrior’s shoulder guard.

‘I speak only the truth, prophet. There’s no shame in this moment. You have done well to even make it this far.’

Talos spat blood again, and hissed two words.

‘Valas Morovai.’

The murderess tilted her head as she looked down at him. Her helm’s crest of black and red hair was dreadlocked by the rain, plastered to her death mask. She looked like a woman sinking into water, shrieking silently as she drowned.

‘Many of your bitter whisperings remain occluded to me,’ she said. ‘You speak… “First Claw”, yes?’ Her unnatural accent struggled with the words. ‘They were your brothers? You call out to the dead, in the hopes they will yet save you. How strange.’

The blade fell from his grip, too heavy to hold any longer. He stared at it lying on the black stone, bathed in the downpour, shining silver and gold as clean as they day he’d stolen it.

Slowly, he lifted his head, facing his executioner. Rain showered the blood from his face, salty on his lips, stinging his eyes. He wondered if she was still smiling behind the mask.

He was going to die here. Here, of all places. On his knees, atop the battlements of his Legion’s deserted fortress, the Night Lord started laughing.

Neither his laughter nor the storm above were loud enough to swallow the throaty sound of burning thrusters. A gunship – blue-hulled and blackly sinister – bellowed its way into view. As it rose above the battlements, rain sluiced from its avian hull in silver streams. Heavy bolter turrets aligned in a chorus of mechanical grinding, the sweetest music ever to grace the prophet’s ears. Talos was still laughing as the Thunderhawk hovered in place, riding its own heat haze, with the dim lighting of the cockpit revealing two figures within.

The alien maiden was already moving. She became a black blur, dancing through the rain in a velvet sprint. Detonations clawed at her heels as the gunship opened fire, shredding the stone at her feet in a hurricane of explosive rounds.

One moment she fled across the parapets, the next she simply ceased to exist, vanishing into shadow.

Talos didn’t rise to his feet, uncertain he’d manage it if he tried. He closed the only eye he had left. The other was a blind and bleeding orb of irritating pain, sending dull throbs back into his skull each time his two hearts beat. His bionic hand, shivering with joint glitches and flawed neural input damage, reached to activate the vox at his collar.

‘I will listen to you, next time.’

Above the overbearing whine of downward thrusters, a voice buzzed over the gunship’s external vox speakers. Distortion stole all trace of tone and inflection.

‘I felt liked I owed you.’

‘I told you to leave. I ordered it.’

‘Master,’ the external vox speakers crackled back. ‘I…’

‘Go, damn you.’ When he next glanced at the gunship, he could see the two figures more clearly. They sat side by side, in the pilots’ thrones. ‘You are formally discharged from my service,’ he slurred the words as he voxed them, and started laughing again.

The gunship stayed aloft, engines giving out their horrendous whine, blasting hot air across the battlements. The rain steamed on the prophet’s armour as it evaporated.

The voice rasping over the vox was female this time. ‘Talos.’

‘Run. Run far from here, and all the death this world offers. Flee to the last city, and catch the next vessel off-world. The Imperium is coming. They will be your salvation. But remember what I said. If Variel escapes alive, he will come for the child one night, no matter where you run.’

‘He might never find us.’

Talos’s laughter finally faded, though he kept the smile. ‘Pray that he doesn’t.’

He drew in a knifing breath as he slumped with his back to the battlements, grunting at the stabs from his ruined lungs and shattered ribs. Grey drifted in from the edge of his vision, and he could no longer feel his fingers. One hand rested on his cracked breastplate, upon the ritually-broken Aquila, polished by the rain. The other rested on his fallen bolter, Malcharion’s weapon, on its side from where he’d dropped it in the earlier battle. With numb hands, the prophet reloaded the double-barrelled bolter, and took another slow pull of cold air into lungs that no longer wanted to breathe. His bleeding gums turned his teeth pink.

‘I’m going after her.’

‘Don’t be a fool.’

Talos let the rain drench his upturned face, no longer gracing the gunship with even a shred of attention. Strange, how a moment’s mercy let them believe they could talk to him like that. He hauled himself to his feet and started walking across the back stone battlements. In one hand he held a broken blade; in the other, an ancient bolter.

‘She killed my brothers,’ he said. ‘I’m going after her.’

The Night Lords have a different method of warfare from most Chaos Space Marines. Not for them the berserk assaults of the World Eaters or psychic barrages of the Thousand Sons – no, the Night Lords are all about lurking in the darkness and stabbing their foes when they aren’t looking. So what would happen when they’re forced into open battle, when they are attacked in such force that their usual tactics simply wouldn’t work? Aaron Dembski-Bowden wondered the same, and decided to explore the idea in Void Stalker, the final book in his Night Lords trilogy:

In the years following the primarch’s death, more and more warbands cut loose from Tsagualsa’s skies and took their raiding deeper into the Imperium. Many were already carving out havens in the Great Eye with the other Legions, spending as much time waging war against former kin as against the minions of the False Emperor.

A battlefleet of staggering size rested above the grey world’s barren face, each warship marked by the winged skull of the Eighth Legion. Here was a fleet that could devastate entire solar systems. It had done so before, many times.

Across the Tsagualsan System, rifts in reality tore open in the silence of the void. They bled foul, daemonic matter into the clean silence of real space, while shuddering battleships strained their way back into the material universe. As with almost all warp flight, there was little cohesion, no alignment of arrival vectors and formations maintained through the rage of empyrean flight. Instead, one by one, the invaders burst from the warp and powered towards the grey world.

At first, they matched the Night Lords’ numbers. Soon, they overshadowed them. As the battle began, by the time the skies of Tsagualsa started to burn, they eclipsed the Eighth Legion fleet completely. More warships arrived with each passing minute, vomited from the warp and streaming trails of poisonous mist.

They needed no formation. They needed no strategic assault plan. That many ships needed nothing else to win a war. The Primogenitor Chapters, the Thirteenth Legion in all but name, had come to end the cancer of heresy once and for all.

Corax a écrit:j'espère qu'il sera mieux Night Lord de Simon Spurrier.

lord of terra a écrit:

Corax a écrit:j'espère qu'il sera mieux Night Lord de Simon Spurrier.

Perso je l'avais trouvé très bien même s'il avait de quoi donner mal à la tête dans ses rebondissements

lord of terra a écrit:

Corax a écrit:j'espère qu'il sera mieux Night Lord de Simon Spurrier.

Perso je l'avais trouvé très bien même s'il avait de quoi donner mal à la tête dans ses rebondissements

Le prophète et la meurtrière se tenaient sur les remparts de la citadelle morte, leurs armes à la main. La pluie tombait en un véritable torrent, assez fort pour obscurcir la vision, tapant régulièrement contre la pierre en coulant de la gueule des horribles gargouilles qui évacuaient l’eau du château par ses coté. Sous la pluie, les seuls bruit audibles venaient de deux figures, l’une humaine, revêtue d’une armure brisée qui vibrait, comme enveloppée d’électricité statique ; l’autre, une vierge extraterrestre équipé d’une tenue de combat au profil terriblement ancien, tannée par une éternité de coups et cicatrices.

-C’est ici que votre légion est morte, n’est-ce pas ?
Sa voix sortait déformée par le heaume qu’elle portait, émergeant de la bouche ouverte de son masque de mort de façon sibylline, comme fondant sous la pluie.
-Nous appelons ce monde Shithr Vejruhk. Quel nom lui donnez vous, vous, dans votre langue de serpent ? Tsagualsa, non ?
-Répond moi, Prophète. Pourquoi as-tu tenu à revenir ici ?
Aucune réponse ne sortit de la bouche du prophète. Un filet de sang acide s’échappa de sa bouche et tomba sur la pierre noire du sol et il laissa échapper un autre souffle rauque.
L’épée dans sa main était brisée, une ruine, coupée à mi chemin de sa longueur. Il n’avait aucune idée d’où pouvait bien se trouver son bolter, et un sourire apparu à travers ses lèvres fendues, comme il senti instinctivement de la culpabilité. C’était certainement un péché de perdre une telle relique de la légion.

-Talos,
La maiden souriait en parlant, il pouvait l’entendre à sa voix. Ce qui était remarquable dans son amusement, c’est qu’il était dépourvu de moquerie et de malice.
-Ne soit pas si honteux, humain, tout le monde meure un jour.
Le prophète se mit sur un genou, du sang s’échappant des fissures de son armure. Ses essais pour ouvrir ses lèvres afin de parler le firent grogner de douleur.la seule chose qu’il pouvait encore sentir était l’odeur chimique de ses propres blessures.
La maiden se rapprocha, poussant l’audace jusqu'à placer le bout de son bâton sur l’épaule du guerrier blessé.
-Je dis seulement la vérité, prophète. Il n’y a pas de honte, en cet instant. Tu as fais tout ce que tu as pu pour arriver si loin.

Talos cracha encore du sang, et glissa deux mots.
-Valas Morovai.
La tueuse inclina la tête tandis qu’elle porta son regard sur lui.
Les cheveux noir et rouge du cimier de son masque étaient enchevêtrés par la pluie, plaqué sur son masque de mort. Elle ressemblait à une naufragée, semblant crier silencieusement sous l’eau, déjà morte.
-Beaucoup de tes âpres murmures demeure obscurs pour moi, dit elle.
-Tu dis : Premières griffes ? C’est ça ?
Son accent surnaturel luttait avec les mots.
-Ou sont tes frères ? Tu les appelles même dans la mort, dans l’espoir qu’ils puissent encore te venir en aide…Comme c’est étrange…
La lame lui échappa des mains, à présent trop lourde pour qu’il puisse la tenir plus longtemps.
Il commença à s’allonger sur la pierre noire, baignant dans la pluie torrentielle, son armure éclatante, d’or et d’argent, brillante comme le jour ou il l’avait volé.
Doucement, il tourna la tête, faisant face à son executeur.la pluie douchait le sang de son visage, dégoulinant sur ses lèvres et brulant ses yeux.

Il se demanda si elle souriait toujours derrière son masque.
Il était bien parti pour mourir ici.ici, dans cet endroit, sur ses genoux, au dessus des fortifications de la forteresse déserté de sa légion, le seigneur noir se mit à rire.
Ni son rire, ni la tempête ne réussir à engloutir le bruit de réacteur approchant. Un vaisseau de guerre à la coque sinistrement bleu et noire apparu dans leur champ de vision.
Comme il se rapprochait des fortifications, la pluie glissait sur sa coque, créant des torrents argentés. De puissantes tourelles de combat s’alignèrent dans un bruit de grincements mécanique : la plus douce des musique qu’il fut donné d’entendre au prophète.
Talos riait toujours tandis que le Thunderhauk faisait du stationnaire, semblant chevaucher un nuage de brume, provoqué par sa propre chaleur. La faible lueur du cockpit dévoilait la présence de deux personnages.
La maiden avait déjà bougé. Elle devint une ombre floue, dansant à travers la pluie dans une envolée de velours. Des détonations griffèrent ses pieds tandis que le Thunderhauk délivrait sa puissance de feu, faisant volée la pierre en éclat sous ses pieds en une explosion circulaire phénoménale.
Un instant elle fut sur le parapet, l’instant d’après elle sembla tout simplement cesser d’exister, comme banni dans les ombres.
Talos ne se remit pas sur ses pieds, incertain du résultat si il essayait.
Il ferma son œil intact, le second réduit à l’état d’une orbe brulante de douleur, sentant un ennuyeux mal de crâne frapper à chaque battement de ses deux cœurs.
Sa main augmentique, malgré ses joints défectueux et les lésions infligés à ses implants neuraux parvint à activer l’émetteur de son col.
-Je vais vous écouter, la prochaine fois.
Couvrant le bruit plaintif des réacteurs, une voix sortit des hauts parleurs extérieurs du vaisseau de combat. Les distorsions effaçaient toutes trace d’intonation et de ton.

-Je sens que vous auriez du.
-Je vous avais dit de partir, je l’avais ordonné.
-Maitre, le haut parleur fit une pause. Je…

Spoiler:

Spoiler: