Shadow Knight Dark Path.pdf

Black Library Live! 2009 Chapbook

Shadow Knight

Limited edition of 500 copies

The Dark Path

Shadow Knight

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

The sins of the father, they say.

Maybe. Maybe not. But we were always different. My brothers and I, we were never truly kin

with the others—the Angels, the Wolves, the Ravens…

Perhaps our difference was our father’s sin, and perhaps it was his triumph. I am not

empowered by anyone to cast a critical eye over the history of the VIII Legion.

These words stick with me, though. The sins of the father. These words have shaped my life.

The sins of my father echo throughout eternity as heresy. Yet the sins of my father’s father are

worshipped as the first acts of godhood. I do not ask myself if this is fair. Nothing is fair . The word

is a myth. I do not care what is fair, and what is right, and what’s unfair and wrong. These concepts

do not exist outside the skulls of those who waste their life in contemplation.

I ask myself, night after night, if I deserve vengeance.

I devote each beat of my heart to tearing down everything I once raised. Remember this,

remember it always: my blade and bolter helped forge the Imperium. I and those like me—we hold

greater rights than any to destroy mankind’s sickened empire, for it was our blood, our bones, and

our sweat that built it.

Look to your shining champions now. The Astartes that scour the dark places of your galaxy.

The hordes of fragile mortals enslaved to the Imperial Guard and shackled in service to the Throne

of Lies. Not a soul among them was even born when my brothers and I built this empire.

Do I deserve vengeance? Let me tell you something about vengeance, little scion of the Imperium.

My brothers and I swore to our dying father that we would atone for the great sins of the past. We

would bleed the unworthy empire that we had built, and cleanse the stars of the False Emperor’s

taint.

This is not mere vengeance. This is redemption.

My right to destroy is greater than your right to live.

Remember that, when we come for you.

He is a child standing over a dying man.

The boy is more surprised than scared. His friend, who has not yet taken a life, pulls him away.

He will not move. Not yet. He cannot escape the look in the bleeding man’s eyes.

The shopkeeper dies.

The boy runs.

He is a child being cut open by machines.

Although he sleeps, his body twitches, betraying painful dreams and sleepless nerves firing as

they register pain from the surgery. Two hearts, fleshy and glistening, beat in his cracked-open

chest. A second new organ, smaller than the new heart, will alter the growth of his bones, encourag-

ing his skeleton to absorb unnatural minerals over the course of his lifetime.

Untrembling hands, some human, some augmetic, work over the child’s body, slicing and

sealing, implanting and flesh-bonding. The boy trembles again, his eyes opening for a moment.

A god with a white mask shakes his head at the boy.

“Sleep.”

The boy tries to resist, but slumber grips him with comforting claws. He feels, just for a

moment, as though he is sinking into the black seas of his homeworld.

Sleep, the god had said.

He obeys, because the chemicals within his blood force him to obey.

A third organ is placed within his chest, not far from the new heart. As the ossmodula warps his

bones to grow on new minerals, the biscopea generates a flood of hormones to feed his muscles.

Surgeons seal the boy’s medical wounds.

Already, the child is no longer human. Tonight’s work has seen to that. Time will reveal just

how different the boy will become.

* * * * *

He is a teenage boy, standing over another dead body.

This corpse is not like the first. This corpse is the same age as the boy, and in its last moments of

life it had struggled with all its strength, desperate not to die.

The boy drops his weapon. The serrated knife falls to the ground.

Legion masters come to him. Their eyes are red, their dark armour immense. Skulls hang from

their pauldrons and plastrons on chains of blackened bronze.

He draws breath to speak, to tell them it was an accident. They silence him.

“Well done,” they say.

And they call him brother.

He is a teenage boy, and the rifle is heavy in his hands.

He watches for a long, long time. He has trained for this. He knows how to slow his hearts, how

to regulate his breathing and the biological beats of his body until his entire form remains as still as

a statue.

Predator. Prey. His mind goes cold, his focus absolute. The mantra chanted internally becomes

the only way to see the world. Predator. Prey. Hunter. Hunted. Nothing else matters.

He squeezes the trigger. One thousand metres away, a man dies.

“Target eliminated,” he says.

He is a young man, sleeping on the same surgery table as before.

In a slumber demanded by the chemicals flowing through his veins, he dreams once again of his

first murder. In the waking world, needles and medical probes bore into the flesh of his back,

injecting fluids directly into his spinal column.

His slumbering body reacts to the invasion, coughing once. Acidic spit leaves his lips, hissing on

the ground where it lands, eating into the tiled floor.

When he wakes, hours later, he feels the sockets running down his spine. The scars, the metallic

nodules…

In a universe where no gods exist, he knows this is the closest mortality can come to divinity.

He is a young man, staring into his own eyes.

He stands naked in a dark chamber, in a lined rank with a dozen other souls. Other initiates

standing with him, also stripped of clothing, the marks of their surgeries fresh upon their pale skin.

He barely notices them. Sexuality is a forgotten concept, alien to his mind, merely one of ten

thousand humanities his consciousness has discarded. He no longer recalls the face of his mother

and father. He only recalls his own name because his Legion masters never changed it.

He looks into the eyes that are now his. They stare back, slanted and murder-red, set in a helmet

with its facial plate painted white. The blood-eyed, bone-pale skull watches him as he watches it.

This is his face now. Through these eyes, he will see the galaxy. Through this skulled helm he

will cry his wrath at those who dare defy the Emperor’s vision for mankind.

“You are Talos,” a Legion master says, “of First Claw, Tenth Company.”

He is a young man, utterly inhuman, immortal and undying.

He sees the surface of this world through crimson vision, with data streaming in sharp, clear

white runic language across his retinas. He sees the life forces of his brothers in the numbers

displayed. He feels the temperature outside his sealed war armour. He sees targeting sights flicker as

they follow the movements of his eyes, and feels his hand, the hand clutching his bolter, tense as it

tries to follow each target lock. Ammunition counters display how many have died this day.

Around him, aliens die. Ten, a hundred, a thousand. His brothers butcher their way through a

city of violet crystal, bolters roaring and chainswords howling. Here and there in the opera of battle-

noise, a brother screams his rage through helm-amplifiers.

The sound is always the same. Bolters always roar. Chainblades always howl. Astartes always

cry their fury. When the VIII Legion wages war, the sound is that of lions and wolves slaying each

other while vultures shriek above.

He cries words that he will one day never shout again—words that will soon become ash on his

tongue. Already he cries the words without thinking about them, without feeling them.

For the Emperor.

He is a young man, awash in the blood of humans.

He shouts words without the heart to feel them, declaring concepts of Imperial justice and

deserved vengeance. A man claws at his armour, begging and pleading.

“We are loyal! We have surrendered!”

The young man breaks the human’s face with the butt of his bolter. Surrendering so late was a

meaningless gesture. Their blood must run as an example, and the rest of the system’s worlds would

fall into line.

Around him, the riot continues unabated. Soon, his bolter is silenced, voiceless with no shells to

fire. Soon after that, his chainsword dies, clogged with meat.

The Night Lords resort to killing the humans with their bare hands, dark gauntlets punching and

strangling and crushing.

At a timeless point in the melee, the voice of an ally comes over the vox. It is an Imperial Fist.

Their Legion watches from the bored security of their landing site.

“What are you doing?” the Imperial Fist demands. “Brothers, are you insane?”

Talos does not answer. They do not deserve an answer. If the Fists had brought this world into

compliance themselves, the Night Lords would never have needed to come here.

He is a young man, watching his homeworld burn.

He is a young man, mourning a father soon to die.

He is a traitor to everything he once held sacred.

Stabbing lights lanced through the gloom.

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