Chapter 14

fourteen

. . .

Thaumas

The deck bucked and yawed beneath our feet as we charged onto the bridge, alarm klaxons shrilling in our ears. Kat matched me stride for stride, a sleek huntress in form-fitting leather, pulse rifle cradled against one shoulder.

I slewed to a halt before the main viewscreen, talons gouging the deck plates. Raked my gaze across the strobing red telltales, the spitting displays showing all systems in the red.

The void itself seemed to shudder before that awful sight. A vast whorled disc of eldritch energies, purple and viridian and colors that had no name. It seethed and roiled like a living thing, crackling with obscene purpose as it gnawed at the fabric of space-time.

And silhouetted against that hellish backdrop, spilling from the ruptured boil of the rift ships. Hundreds, thousands, a chittering swarm of vessels straight out of a madman's nightmares. Jagged and insectile, all chitin and spikes and flickering lights that hurt the eyes.

"Thaumas," Kat breathed, dread and awe. "What the fuck are those?"

"Trouble," I growled, wings mantling. The energies spilling from the rift sizzled across my pinions, setting every feather on edge. "Big, cosmos-ending trouble."

I whirled on Raza, the lean Saurian first mate. He was bent over the nav console, fingers flying across the haptics.

"Get us out of here," I barked. "Best speed for the Shrouded Reach. We need to warn the clans, get them mobilized before that swarm reaches inhabited space."

"Trying, boss," he hissed, brow furrowed in concentration. "But that grav well has us but good. Engines are stuck in idle, and the jump drive is spitting sparks across half my boards."

As if to punctuate his words, the ship shuddered again. The deck tilted at a steep angle, inertial compensators straining to handle the conflicting gravities. I compensated smoothly, gyros whirring, but Kat stumbled against me with a startled yelp.

I caught her against my side, taking her weight easily. She fit there perfectly, all sleek curves and coiled power. I buried my beak in her hair, just for a moment. Breathed in her scent - ozone and blade oil, the crisp bite of winter apples.

Ancestors, but I loved this fearless woman. Drew such strength from her unflinching courage, the diamond-bright blaze of her spirit. With her at my side, I felt I could conquer galaxies. Rend the very stars from the firmament.

"The grav well," I said suddenly, pieces clicking together. "It's not coming from the rift. There's something else out there, some other source"

"There!" Kat thrust a finger at the screen, emerald eyes wide. "What the fekk is that?"

I followed her pointing finger, already dreading what I would see. The swarm was parting before a new arrival, a vast and terrible shape emerging from the unlight depths of the rift.

It was a ship, if such a blasphemous thing could be called a ship. Miles long, a jagged thorn of obsidian and twisting metal. It dwarfed the swarm vessels, an apex predator among minnows.

And the wrongness, the crawling otherness radiating from its hull. It seared itself into my brain like a white-hot brand. I tasted copper and madness on my tongue, felt the first niggling fingers of insanity plucking at my mind.

"Ancestors preserve us," I croaked, throat closing in atavistic terror. "It's a Tomb Ship. A charnel-barge of the Necrontyr, the star-gods who once ruled the galaxy with an iron fist."

Raza spat a vicious oath, the Saurian tongue lending it extra venom. "The Necrontyr are a myth! A story told to hatchlings to make them behave!"

"Does that look like a fekking myth to you?" I snarled, gesturing savagely at the screen. At the awful, world-breaking reality hanging before us like a promise of Armageddon.

Kat's hand found mine, fingers lacing tight. Anchoring me in the now, the warm reality of our bond. "What do we do, Thaumas? How do we fight that?"

I shook my head, a leaden weight in my crop. "We don't, love. Not alone. Not without an army at our backs and the gods themselves at our side."

I turned to Raza, grim purpose settling over me like a mantle. "Dump the core. Shunt every scrap of power to the engines. We burn hard for Raptoria, and we pray to the Lost Mothers that we aren't already too late."

Raza sketched a salute, eyes flinty with resolve. "Aye, boss. One bucked-up escape, coming right up."

The ship shuddered again as he worked, the bone-deep groan of a wounded beast. I felt the thrum of the engines kicking into high gear, with the deck vibrating like a plucked string.

And still that Tomb Ship loomed, an obsidian shark scenting blood on the cosmic currents. I felt its attention, its awful hunger turned towards us. Prickling the short hairs on my nape, oily and invasive.

It knew. It saw us, this insignificant speck of resistance. And it wanted us, burned to snuff out our defiant light and grind us to shrieking atoms between its gears.

"Punch it!" I roared, a predator's fury thrumming through my veins. Kat sank into a fighting crouch beside me, rifle humming as she primed the coils. Preparing to sell our lives dearly, paint the void with our rage and ruin.

And as the first lance of eldritch lightning seared past the viewscreen, the ship convulsed around us, and the stars smeared to starlings as we leaped for safety, for home.

Ancestors, let it be enough, I prayed, a fierce and desperate entreaty. Let us reach Raptoria in time, rally the clans for the horror to come.

For if we failed, if we fell, there would be no sanctuary. No respite from the chittering, squamous dark rising to smother the galaxy once more.

Only a final death, and the void's cold kiss.

And that was unacceptable. Not while I still drew breath. Not while my huntress stood strong and proud at my side, the lodestone of my forever heart.

We would fight. We would bleed. And we would prevail or perish in the attempt.

For what other choice was there, with the fate of worlds hanging in the balance?

With a snarl of defiance, I wrapped an arm around Kat and braced for the trials ahead. For the dark and savage road rising to meet us, drenched in blood and thunder.

We had a war to win.

The stars blurred to streaks of light as we hurtled through the void, engines straining at the redline. Kat stood firm at my side, rifle cradled and eyes hard as flint. Ready to face the oncoming storm, the rising dark, with all the fearless fire that made her the lodestone of my forever heart.

And Void, but I needed that strength now. Drew from it like a drowning man gulping air as the specter of my past reared its ugly head. The sins and scars I'd long buried, now clawing their way to the surface in a reeking miasma of blood and bitter ash.

Raptoria. My ancestral home, the birthplace of my kind. A world of obsidian spires and crimson skies, where the very shadows throbbed with the beat and pulse of ancient secrets. Deadly ones, if the sinking leaden dread in my guts was any indicator.

I hadn't set foot on its surface in decades. Not since the Culling, the brutal rite of passage that had seen me ripped from my family's bosom. Thrust into the crucible of the Legion's training pits, to be reforged in the fires of pain and death and unrelenting discipline.

I still bore the scars of that sundering. The latticework of plasma burns and ritual blades, etched into ebon flesh and feather. Each one a reminder, a memorial to all I had sacrificed on the altar of duty and honor.

But for all that I had endured, all that I had lost nothing could have prepared me for the devastation that awaited us as we knifed through Raptoria's atmosphere. The smoke and screams that rose to greet us, a macabre mockery of welcome.

"Thaumas," Kat breathed, horror and disbelief strangling the words. "What the fuck happened here?"

I could only shake my head, mute with shock and dawning dread. The great spires of Blacktalon, my family's ancestral keep, they jutted from the cratered earth like broken teeth, jagged and crumbling. Belching gouts of flame and oily smoke into the churning sky.

And beyond, in the bone-littered killing fields where I had earned my first crimson plumage, a seething, chittering ocean of bodies. Twisted and wrong, carapaces gleaming wetly in the ruddy light. Skittering and gibbering as they swarmed over the blasted landscape, a living tide of chitin and madness.

"The hive fleet," I croaked, the words ashes on my tongue. "The Necrontyr's shrieking vanguard. But how?"

How had they arrived so swiftly, so devastatingly? Overrun Raptoria's defenses, the hardy clans and their legendary wrath, in what seemed like the space between one heartbeat and the next?

Unless.

Ice crystalized in my veins with a sudden, awful certainty. The sibilant whispers, the niggling sense of wrongness that had haunted my dreams these past weeks. Impressions of eyes in the dark, of claws and fangs and a terrible, ravening hunger.

"They were already here," I said hollowly. Pieces slotting together in a blood-drenched mosaic of betrayal and ruin. "Seeded by traitors in the clans, turncoats bought with silver and dark promises."

I thought of Zarath's words, his mad ramblings of gods and resurrection. The squirming truths couched in that lunatic rant, just waiting for the right spark to ignite them. To set the galaxy ablaze with the Necrontyr's foul ambition.

"We walked into a fekking trap," I snarled. Fury rose in a scorching tide, talons gouging furrows in the unyielding metal of the deck. The urge to rend and tear, to paint the stars crimson with the ruin of my enemies, near overpowering.

But I throttled it to heel, reined in the beast howling behind my breast-bone. Now was not the time for berserker wrath, for glorious and empty sacrifice. Not with Kat at my side, her survival the only thing that mattered in this benighted universe.

"We need to move," I bit out, spinning on my heel. Already calculating vectors and contingencies, the cold equations of our continued existence. "Get to the secondary spaceport, commandeer a ship. If we can slip the cordon."

The deck bucked beneath our feet, a tortured scream of rending metal. Proximity alarms shrilled as the ship yawed sickeningly, inertia slamming us into the bulkheads.

"Hull breach!" Raza barked over the comm, voice stretched tight with strain. "Grapples incoming, trying to reel us in! Fekk, they're."

His voice cut off in a burst of static. I swore sulfurously, talons scrabbling for purchase as the deck canted at a steeper angle. The reek of scorched polymer, of overloading circuitry, acrid in my nostrils.

Kat clung to my side like a lioness tensed to spring. Pulse rifle whining as she racked the slide, emerald eyes fever-bright in the strobing red glare.

"How many?" she asked, a huntress to her core. Falling into the familiar rhythms of impending violence, the dance was macabre of fang and flame.

"Too many," I growled. Already sensing the skittering, chitinous tide swarming our wounded vessel. The eager chitter of a thousand bladed limbs, the reek of dripping ichor. "We can't repel them, not if we want to keep the ship intact."

"Do you trust me?" I asked softly. Gently cupping her face, thumb smoothing over the velvet skin of her cheek. Memorizing every beloved plane and angle, every scar and freckle. Greedily hoarding this one perfect moment to warm me in the trials ahead.

"Always," she breathed. Leaning into my touch, lashes fluttering against my palm. "Unto the very ending of the worlds."

Something cracked open in my chest at her words, a chasm of light and heat and unending devotion. The unassailable conviction, diamond-hard, that I would conquer galaxies for this woman. Rend the very stars from the firmament, if she but asked it of me.

"Then we don't fight," I said, the words heavy with finality. Already calculating the risks, the cold algebra of survival. "We go to ground, find a bolt hole. Regroup and plan our next move."

Then the hull shrieked like a damned soul, a rending cacophony of tortured metal, and the swarm poured in. A chittering tide of teeth and claws and compound eyes, insectile bodies contorting obscenely as they scrambled through the jagged wound.

We met them with fang and flame. Pulse bolts and shuriken, desperate defiance flaring incandescent against the squirming dark. Buying precious seconds with each blood-drenched kill, each faltering step of retreat.

But it wasn't enough. Could never be enough against that seething, inexorable tide. We were a guttering candle before a hurricane, a single spark flailing against the crushing black.

And as the swarm pressed in, carapaces crunching wetly beneath our boots, a new sound reached my ears. A deep, groaning roar, like the cracking of continental plates, the sundering of worlds.

I risked a glance at the viewscreen, dread a leaden weight in my crop. Just in time to see the sky split open, bruise-dark and writhing. Disgorging a shape out of nightmare, a silhouette to freeze the blood and flay the sanity.

The Tomb Ship had arrived. Raptoria's doom came calling on wings of ebon smoke and gravitic lightning. And as its shadow fell across the blasted killing fields, eclipsing the bloody light.

I knew, with a sick, sinking certainty, that the true battle was only just beginning. That this was merely the first verse in a dark and savage epic, the opening salvo in a war to shake the very cosmos.

Ancestors, I prayed, a fierce and desperate entreaty. Let us prevail. Let us weather this oncoming storm, that we might see the dawn renewed.

But as the swarm pressed ever closer, a chitinous wave hungry for our flesh. I feared those prayers would be in vain. That they would join the ashes and echoes of my ravaged home, scattered to the uncaring void.

We were out of time. Out of options. With nothing left to cling to but each other, the unbreakable bond forged in the crucible of all we had endured.

Nothing, save the savage spitfire will to survive. To spit in the eye of Armageddon itself, and dare the gods to do their worst.

And we would not slip into that good night. Would not let the darkness claim us without a final blaze of glory to light our way.

So I locked eyes with my lioness, my lodestone, and together we plunged into the fray. Determined to carve our legend into the face of eternity, or perish in the attempt.

The galaxy would tremble to hear our names. This I swore on the ashes of Raptoria and the unending thunder of my hearts.

We had arrived to find our home in turmoil, besieged by nightmares made flesh. But we would not bow, would not break.

For we were the deathless defenders, and our war had only just begun.