My Life as A Death Guard
Chapter 376: A Traitor
The gods watched their agents in the mortal realm.
Their agents, in turn, watched the gods.
Now, they answered one another across the void.
He had come.
. . .
He imagined the prow of the Iron Blood reflecting the bewildering, uncanny light of the Eye of Stars, the tides of the warp here far more resplendent than at the Mandeville Point.
No one believed him.
Perturabo thought in silence.
His final conversation had been with Ferrus Manus. He had voiced his doubts to the one most like himself, only to be cut off without mercy.
The Lord of Medusa refused to acknowledge the strange phenomena Perturabo perceived—just like the others. No one, not even a Primarch, could see the landscape reflected in Perturabo's eyes.
That eye.
He was different.
Unlike his brothers, Perturabo had lost all memory of his early childhood. From the moment he became aware of himself, he realized he was standing atop a mountain, his face streaked with tears, as the sky cast its gaze upon him—and he returned its stare.
The Eye of Terror.
After yet another failed attempt at explanation, Perturabo named the galactic rift on his own. Wherever he was—whether in the deepest vaults of Olympia or within the inner sanctums of the Imperial Palace on Terra; wherever he went—whether leading the Iron Warriors plunging into the warp, or resting with an entire fleet in the Tempestus Segmentum—he could feel its gaze upon him.
The intuition of the Lord of Iron told him this was a wound vast enough to tear the entire world apart, a Pandora's box that concealed entities no mind could truly comprehend.
But no one listened.
The Imperium celebrated the appointment of the Warmaster, marveled at the hasty conclusion of Nikaea. Even conspiracy theorists focused on the sudden fall of the Perfect City—rather than on a celestial phenomenon that had not yet even been named.
For the sake of the Great Crusade, Perturabo and his Iron Warriors had been endlessly campaigning across the stars. Rest was something the Lord of Iron could not tolerate, nor would he halt the operations of an entire Legion merely to satisfy his own curiosity.
But now, he was very close to the Eye of Terror… Ullanor lay just beneath it. Only a short warp jump was needed—and he could see it for himself.
No new orders had arrived. The Emperor had returned to Terra, while the Warmaster seemed to have been held up by the Great Angel of Baal. The Wolf King was occupied with a flood of affairs, and for the Iron Warriors—always silent, always reliable—Leman Russ simply allowed Perturabo to decide the course of his own expedition.
Perturabo brooded in silence over how much the Imperium had changed while he and his Legion fought in distant, forgotten sectors.
The Lord of Iron had always been close to the Crimson King, but when Perturabo finally finished burning away those crude green creatures, he discovered that Magnus had been declared a criminal.
And Lorgar. Perturabo had worried about Lorgar's state after the burning of the Perfect City, but it seemed Lorgar had instead fallen into a strange and dangerous fanaticism.
And Dorn… the Imperial Fists had been appointed as Terra's defensive Legion.
Perturabo drew in a deep breath, feeling anger churn within his chest. While he and his sons were thrown into remote and thankless battlefields, the heart of the Imperium had already been turned upside down. They were the forgotten, the abandoned—excluded from the Imperium's center.
The Primarch's massive hand twitched as he crushed the commendation letter bearing Malcador's sigil of arcane runes into a crumpled ball.
His thoughts were as wrinkled and chaotic as the paper itself.
An empty pelt. Perturabo thought.
Now, he would go and do something of his own.
. . .
+By the terms of the pact, you are not permitted to flee again without authorization.+
Steam roared, arcs of lightning leapt. The profane body of steel and iron hunched forward, blood mingling with machine oil as it streamed from beneath its feet.
Vashtorr braced himself on his massive hammer, standing upon the parched earth. In the distance, black spires rose in silence across the plains.
Laton of the Death Guard stood at the side of the Lord of the Forge. His once pallid power armor now looked as if it had been soaked in viscous slime, a greenish hue seeping upward from the greaves. From the seams of the armor, a few adorable little mushrooms had begun to sprout.
Slowly, he stroked the head of a native in his hand—newly taken. The barbarian's purple eyes looked inorganic, like polished stone.
"It won't happen," he said languidly, then carefully tied the head to his belt.
"You really made a pact with my lord?" Laton asked cautiously.
Vashtorr lowered its massive form, eyes blazing with furnace-fire as it regarded the little apothecary with open loathing.
+This concerns the fate of the Empyrean itself. Afterward, there will of course be treachery and renewed war, but the prerequisite for the war of celebration is the death of the Cursed One.+
+No warp entity would ever equivocate on a matter like this.+
"But you still haven't answered my question."
Vashtorr shifted. The jagged metallic bone-wings upon its back unfurled.
+No,+ it said, +They have invested more than enough into the death of the Cursed One—far more than you could possibly know. For this, They were even willing to set aside a few of their lesser amusements… They hate losing control, but this matter demands a price.+
Vashtorr sounded as though it were speaking to itself. Its voice dropped lower and lower. The bone-wings beat once, and after a violent distortion of space, the Lord of the Forge departed from the place.
"All right… I still don't really understand, but I wish you a pleasant day." Laton muttered.
From his belt he selected that vial of reagent. The small bloom of red-rust color was especially beautiful within the glass. After countless refinements, iterations, and blessings, it had become quite a fine gift indeed.
"Losing control?" he murmured to himself.
"Then… who is it that's about to gain freedom?"
. . .
A plague struck the Iron Warriors' fleet.
The final jump toward the Eye of Terror failed. All navigators screamed in agony as they strangled themselves to death; those whose arms were torn away in time by Iron Warriors bled from all seven orifices and died all the same.
Deprived of their navigators, the ships drifted within the warp. Under normal circumstances, they might have executed an emergency jump using a series of complex and precise mathematical coordinates—but the chaotic psychic fields near the Eye of Terror made this all but impossible.
As the Lord of Iron locked himself inside his workshop, burying himself in warp-coordinate calculations, a strange plague began to spread throughout the entire fleet.
This was not a plague aimed at flesh.
It was a carnival for steel and iron.
Rust, red as fresh blood, crawled over the hulls of the Iron Warriors' vessels as though alive. Ventilation fans ground to a hoarse halt. Engines let out a final, mournful cry before dying completely.
When the maintenance crews tore away the casings—which crumbled at a mere touch—they were horrified to find that the intricate mechanisms within had all rotted under corrosion, collapsing into rich, fertile sludge.
To turn engines of war into arable soil might be a pacifist's dream—but it was not the outcome the Lord of Iron desired.
The rust spread with terrifying speed. The longer it lasted, the weaker the Geller Fields became—the very shields that protected the ships from the warp's turbulent tides.
By the time Perturabo was finally summoned from his workshop by his panicking sons, the sudden, rapidly spreading epidemic had already left a third of the fleet completely stranded in the rivers of the warp.
Critical structures were so badly corroded that the ships could barely hope to translate out of the warp again. And when it became clear that humans themselves could act as carriers, spreading the contagion to other vessels, the Lord of Iron decisively ordered those ships beyond salvation to break away from the main fleet.
Abandoned, the doomed vessels sought their own paths. They drifted helplessly, trying to follow in the wake of the main force—but most, stripped of their protective fields, vanished in the next instant into the warp's raging currents.
Perhaps the plague had already infected the entire fleet from the very beginning, its earlier harmlessness nothing more than a long incubation period. And now, in the warm, damp warp near the Eye of Terror, the drifting spores had finally realized it was time to grow and multiply.
Even the hardest ceramite can be corroded.
The abandoned Iron Warriors—the Iron Warriors who watched their comrades be abandoned, who watched all metal decay—felt fear rising in their hearts. In the warp, that fear sent ripples outward, and those ripples further hastened the revel of the rust spores.
This was a long imprisonment with no defined end.
At first, Perturabo still maintained his cold, unyielding composure. He decisively amputated most of the infected, irredeemable ships from the fleet. When he realized this was still insufficient to eliminate the source of contagion, he began ordering the main force to open fire on those vessels that refused to break away. This sparked minor unrest within the Iron Warriors, but it was crushed under Perturabo's habitual iron hand.
During the suppression, the Lord of Iron discovered by chance that flame, gun smoke, and blood could slow the spread of the spores.
Thus, the remaining ships—still appearing intact—began to pour their ammunition into their own interiors, smearing rusted surfaces with the blood of mortal crew.
The once clean and orderly corridors of the Iron Warriors' vessels descended into chaos. Rust, smoke, and dried blood were everywhere, like the prelude to some grand sacrificial rite.
Yet these futile struggles could not halt the rust that slowly devoured the metal hearts of the ships. The shortage of mortal crew and the relentless spread of corrosion caused internal communications to fail. Some Iron Warriors could no longer contact their superiors, and Perturabo himself had not been seen in person for what felt like a very long time.
After angrily berating the Tridents—accusing them of interrupting calculations that might have allowed the entire fleet to translate out of the warp—the Primarch sealed himself back inside his workshop. Once more, Perturabo took up pen and paper, attempting to calculate the next window in which the fleet might escape the warp's turbulent currents.
Again and again, Perturabo approved the Tridents' requests to imitate him by cutting away infected ships. He calculated with mounting irritation. This should have been his forte, yet despair, madness, and restlessness broke his concentration time and again.
Perturabo could not bear to imagine the looks others would give him when he next appeared at the head of a fleet. What would they think? How would they judge him? That a single foolish warp voyage had cost him a third of his fleet?
At the thought, the Lord of Iron felt ice spread through his body. The hand gripping the pen went still.
No, Perturabo told himself softly. He should have been calculating with an undistracted mind—this was supposed to bring him calm. Yet now, under the curse of his abandoned sons, the Lord of Iron found himself unable to complete the work he had once mastered so effortlessly.
Long stretches of time wore him down, dismantled him piece by piece. When Perturabo finally lifted his head again, he stared in shock at the augur display: only a single Iron Warriors vessel remained—the Iron Blood itself. At that moment, a crack finally appeared in the Lord of Iron's icy façade.
In disbelief, he opened the door to his workshop. In the empty corridors lay his scattered sons, poised on the blurred boundary between life and death, trapped in place by their completely rusted power armor, unable to move.
"Forrix?"
The Primarch called out to the last Trident with whom he had been in contact. There was no answer.
His Iron Circle Battle-Automata were also immobilized by rust. After a brief hesitation, the Primarch abandoned them.
Perturabo stepped forward. He walked on, Terminator armor treading across thick red rust as though through deep Olympia snow. As if drawn by some unseen summons, he headed straight for the deck of the Iron Blood.
At Perturabo's own insistence, the Iron Blood had no observation windows. He walked through long, dark corridors, warm and damp, smeared with the blood of his sons.
The deaths, entrapment, and suffering of his sons did not in themselves strike Perturabo with much emotional force. But what they represented did: his dereliction, his incompetence, his weakness. A sense of failure began to crawl up his heart like rust—
And of course, the Primarch was keenly aware of the tremor within his own soul.
The spongy rust spores carpeting the deck let out a small, disgruntled mutter.
Heartless, it said.
He stepped onto the deck. The uncanny light of the warp enveloped him. At some point unknown, the Iron Blood's Geller Field had completely collapsed. By all reason, any being exposed to the warp's raging currents should have died—but Perturabo still stood there upon the deck of the Iron Blood, outwardly intact.
Drifting without restraint, the Iron Blood had long since floated into the interior of the Eye of Terror. Now, Perturabo trembled, tears streaming from his eyes as he stared directly at the god-eye he had first seen the very moment he became conscious.
The god looked back at him.
From afar came the rumble of engines. Perturabo watched, trembling, as the ships he had decisively abandoned earlier emerged from the bizarre currents of light.
The corrosion was gone. Hellfire roared and burned. He caught the distinctive scorched stench of a furnace at work. Upon the foremost vessel stood a monster of iron and blood, sparks of the forge bursting from its eyes.
+I am the Lord of the Forge, Vashtorr.+
Iron grated against iron. Bone-wings made of hardened steel cables beat once, and in an instant Vashtorr stood before Perturabo.
+Do you seek reforging, Lord of Iron?+
The immense mechanical monster extended its hand toward the Primarch.
Perturabo's pupils trembled.
"So all of this was nothing more than—"
+No,+ Vashtorr interrupted him, speaking with unmistakable certainty.
+I come here, Perturabo, to congratulate you on casting off all shackles and nightmares. In the name of the Lord of the Forge, you shall be reborn.+
"What do you want? And what price must I pay?" Perturabo said bluntly.
This caused Vashtorr's eyes to flare with arcs of delighted lightning.
+Yes. That is precisely why I chose you—why I recommended you.+
Vashtorr coughed lowly, furnace-fire spilling from its mouth.
+I will show you the truth. In return, you must promise me this: you will plunge the entire Imperium into calamity.+
Perturabo frowned. He tightened his grip on his weapon, his muscles twitching involuntarily.
"No…" he said softly.
"Warp-spawn, if that is your intent, then begone. I would rather rot here together with the Iron Blood."
Vashtorr regarded him calmly.
+I thought you had been abandoned, which is why I came to extend this invitation…+
The Lord of the Forge turned, about to depart.
Perturabo stood upon the blood-red rust-moss, alone amid the ruins of the Iron Blood—
"Wait. Abandoned?" he spoke abruptly.
"What are you talking about? Answer me."
Vashtorr slowly turned back.
+You are being somewhat rude, Lord of Iron.+ it said unhurriedly.
+The Perfect City fell. Prospero burned. And now you are sent to the Obscurus Segmentum—was that not his will?+
+He seized and twisted your very nature without consent, then cast you aside when you were no longer needed. Magnus's tragedy is regrettable, but I find it even harder to tolerate those who share my inclinations being discarded into a corner.+
Vashtorr paused. The monster sighed softly, watching with satisfaction as Perturabo began to tremble almost imperceptibly. The rust sensed his wavering and crept closer to the Primarch…
Vashtorr suddenly smashed its warhammer into the ground. Sparks flew, and the rust slowly receded.
Perturabo lowered his gaze, staring at the corrosion. When he looked up again, the abandoned ships bore not a single trace of rust.
Vashtorr's voice sounded once more.
+Very well. I will take you out of this region. But as a reminder, I want you to look upon the truth. We cannot afford to see yet another Primarch abandoned.+
Perturabo stared at Vashtorr.
"Fine." he said.
<+>
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