Choices, Part 4

Well, here it is, the final proper chapter of Choices. This was always meant to be 4 parts, followed by a sort of epilogue/interlude. Coming up after that will be Sisters, a longer and more fleshed out story following off of what this has built.

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If the Grimm Queen was aware of Shield-Captain Ankelion’s entrance, the woman made no show of it.

Calmly, he observed the scene before him. The pedestal below the floating font was one of polished black stone, placed at the very center of the chamber and directly beneath the dome above. Upon closer inspection, said font softly glowed with a dim blue light as it hovered just above its resting place, a small and simple cloth pillow. It bore no resemblance to any Chaotic or warp artifact he had ever seen or knew of, but appearances were always deceiving with such esoteric and dangerous relics of bygone eras.

Salem was facing away from him. He considered the traitor, all that he knew. An immortal and unstoppable sorceress at the head of a night-endless host of monsters was not a foe to be underestimated. The Lamenters had tried everything they could to slay her, to put her down for good. Nothing they had worked, no tactic or stratagem, no gun or blade. The Master of Mankind, his Lord, no doubt would have had a way to cut her down on the spot. Perhaps a single blow from his vast psychic might, giving her the true death she deserved. But the Emperor was not here, only his Custodes in His name.

The Shield-Captain had given the traitor’s nature thought as well. Her apparent immortality had reminded him of scattered reports of similar individuals, from the early days of the Imperium. Individuals to whom death was a hindrance rather than something permanent. They’d had a name for their kind. Ankelion gripped his paragon Spear, steeling himself for the coming fight. He lacked the means to dispatch such a foe, but he had the next best thing.

And as Ankelion drew closer to his enemy, he could make out the sound of weeping.

No, not weeping.

Laughing.

At once it grew in intensity, as the Lamp ceased floating and fell back to the pillow beneath it. The laughter held a maniacal bend to it, erupting forth from the woman in bellowing, twisted mirth. She threw her head back, letting howls and cackles fill the chamber. It turned something inside Ankelion, triggering an old, distant feeling of revulsion and disgust. The woman was completely mad and insane, that much was clear. but she wouldn’t be for much longer.

“If only you knew the truth,” she managed between giggles. At once she pivoted to look at him, and his first in-person impression of her was one of revulsion and disgust. Whatever normal human shade of skin and hair color Salem may have once had had long been bleached to alabaster. Perhaps it had been by whatever corruption permeated this land, or from whatever foul sorcery she practiced. Her clothing was disheveled and her hair was unkempt, a fitting state for a traitor. What might have been an elegant, form-fitting dress was rumpled and stained from a lack of care or concern. Her eyes were blood red, pitch-black pupils filled with scorn. Looking into those eyes, he saw only madness and hatred.

To her words, the Shield-Captain said nothing in reply. He had no words for this traitor, not yet. He stopped beneath the point where the flat ceiling above ended and the edge of the dome began, the invisible threshold of her innermost sanctum. The traitor was taken by yet another fit of madness-induced laughter, only subsiding as she spoke. “These Lamenters, your Imperium,” she spat the words, “All of them. Deceived to the last. The greatest lie he ever told! Do you know, oh Custodian?”

Ankelion thought about what to say. There was nothing rational in those wild, madness-filled eyes, nothing deserving of any more than his contempt. “You stand before one of His Own, the Ten Thousand,” he decided on. “You will die today for good, craven filth.”

The woman’s reaction was a bark of laughter. “Jinn showed me everything, you know. All of it. All of his plots and schemes, everything he dreamt of. Between moments in time, I saw it all.” Yet another fit of giggles. “He played you all like a harp, like a… a common fiddle. Even your cherished Captain-General. Even you, Darasus Ankelion.”

Ankelion felt a flash of shock, at the hearing of his name. The name He gave to Ankelion, ten millennia ago. How did this witch learn his name? Through warpcraft of some sort? And she spoke of the Master of Mankind, his Master.

Ankelion disregarded everything she said as lies to fall upon deaf ears. “Remember that name, traitor. After you die, tell whatever horrors you worship that it was I who sent you to him.”

The witch just laughed some more. “You don’t know? No, you really don’t know, the truth about Him?” Another, louder fit of laughter. “And me, the traitor?” The madwoman laughed. “It was Ozma that betrayed me so long ago. Him and the Brothers, and all their schemes and plans. Oh, wouldn’t you love to know them? Wouldn’t He love to know?”

Abruptly she moved, a backhand strike knocking the font from the pedestal behind her. The font was sent hurtling, crashing into a nearby table and spinning across the floor. It didn’t break, nor did it seem any worse for wear. “You’ve been deceived, I’ve been deceived. Your whole Imperium is one giant tissue of lies and deceit. But enough talk, have at you.”

Abruptly the witch moved, dashing at Ankelion with incredible speed, her outstretched hands wreathed in unnatural black flame. She screamed at him, in rage and fury. The Shield-Captain dodged to the left, a slash of his Paragon Spear to the right neatly beheading the woman at her neck. A single shot barked from its bolt caster mid-swing, the mass reactive charge neatly bursting the woman’s skull. The headless, gory corpse sailed past him, tumbling to the floor in a squall of hemorrhaging black blood.

Salem was dead, but not for long. Not even for longer than a moment. Her head simply regenerated, the corpse reanimating and standing up even before there should have been a brain to govern it. A vicious swing bisected the woman from her neck stump to her hips, the blade came up and did the same to her waist, neatly quartering her. The sections fell to the floor inert, and once more the chunks began to reform, dissolving and reforming into the arch-traitor. She was made whole once more, her clothing returned pristine and in a far better state than when he first saw her. “Don’t you get it? You cannot kill me,” The woman stated matter of factly as she rose from the ground, a wide, savage grin spreading across her face. “But, I can kill you and your broth-”

Ankelion cut her down before she could even finish the word, her head lopped clean off for the second time. He grabbed the head, a smile still etched on its face and crushed it in his gauntlet, gore spraying in all directions. The Lamenters’ assessment of her immortality was proving to be unfortunately accurate, and he was going to have to resort to drastic measures. A sort of last resort, a small but extremely integral component to his Paragon Spear.

This time, Ankelion focused on the way her flesh regenerated, how solid turned to liquid and gas and back again. Ragged chunks of oozing flesh that clung to his gauntlet dissipated, puffs of miasmic smoke flowing toward the fallen traitor’s exposed neck. On the floor, rivulets of oozing black blood returned to its owner, rejoining the whole. Ankelion scrutinized the exposed flesh. If the woman had ever been human, she was no longer anything remotely such, save for the general appearance she still took. He was no Apothecary like a few of his chosen Brethren, but nothing he saw in that stump remotely resembled muscles, sinew, bones or blood vessels. A nearly homogenous mass of undifferentiated non-flesh, all but identical to the physiology of the Grimm she commanded.

“You can’t kill me,” Salem repeated, once more whole after a few moments’ time. “Do you have any more tricks? I grow bored, you plaything of a so-called god.” She launched into the air with a laugh, taking flight within the dome. Ankelion grimaced. The Lamenters had confirmed that the witch could actually fly under her own power, yet another trick Salem had as part of her repertoire. Ankelion responded in kind, leveling his bolt caster at her and squeezing the trigger in the spear’s shaft. But to his disconcernation, the burst of shells he cast forth hung in the air before the witch, arrested by a barrier of energy between them, harmlessly detonated a meter away as their fuzes ran out.

The witch’s smile grew, and Ankelion became aware of a presence behind him. With lightning reflexes he turned and beheaded the creature rising from a growing pool of the traitor’s spilled blood behind him, a hulking Beringel that had sought to ambush him with a bear hug. Elsewhere more of them rose, climbing out from puddles of the ooze that had spilled from the traitor’s veins. Ankelion cut his way through them, massacring the beasts before they could even free themselves from the liquid.

As the last of them died, he turned back to the traitor. Ankelion had seen it for the distraction it was, fully expecting an attack to follow. With a blast and roar of heat and light, The Shield-Captain suddenly felt himself being pushed back, as searing and blinding beams of not-light burst forth from the witch’s outstretched hands. He turned to the side, letting his pauldron take the brunt of the assault levied against him.

The Lamenters had made mention of the attack, a strange, accursed form of energy capable of cooking Space Marines alive in their armor, so intense it was capable of slagging even ceramite. The heat was tremendous, warping and fraying the filigree that decorated his armor. His panopoly simply crumbled to ash, cremated by the sheer heat. Even the flagstone beneath his greaves began to glow red from the overwhelming heat.

Thinking quickly, Ankelion grabbed a leg of a nearby oaken table, heaving the piece of furniture up and hurling it at the airborne witch. The traitor reacted quickly, the beams rushing forth from her hands neatly slicing the offending table in half. One missed her entirely, sailing toward the far end of the library. But the other clipped her waist, gouging a rent into her corrupted flesh. It disoriented her, and in the end that momentary distraction was all the Shield-Captain needed. He charged the witch as she fell, his Paragon Spear ready to impale her. Sensing his approach she reacted, resuming her attack upon him with the eldritch beams of energy as she hit the floor.

But Ankelion would not be denied. Where Lamenter had perished and fell, He held. No, not merely held, he advanced. He charged her through her own attack, and with a mighty lunge of his spear he ran her through, the glowing tip of his lance impaling her to the hilt. The bolt caster was spent, but he no longer needed it. Pivoting the mighty weapon downward, he drove the blade into the flagstone floor of the librarium, pinning the witch there against the glowing rock. She screamed, but whether it was merely in pain, or with madness and rage or some combination of all three, Ankelion cared not.

“Death,” Ankelion hissed. “What you fail to realize, traitor, is that there are fates worse than death.” The beams from her palms fizzled out, leaving Ankelion’s armor glowing in some places. “Here and now, you shall suffer one such fate!”

Ankelion triggered the device, built into the shaft of his Paragon Spear. His last resort. The device was arcane, its construction and design poorly understood by even the Adeptus Mechanicus of Mars. But like all technology used by the brotherhood, to them it was a triviality. On his command, the stasis field generator sprang to life, spawning a bubble of locked space-time from a point near the hilt of his spear’s blade. The Shield-Captain dashed backward, lest he be caught in the rapidly expanding bubble of the arch-traitor’s demise.

Salem’s face was frozen in a reaction that Ankelion couldn’t quite place. Anger, surprise, hatred, fear, pain. Aspects of all of them were now etched on her face for all eternity. She was reaching up toward him, as if to gouge out his eyes behind his helm. And she would continue to reach, for uncountable eons. Perhaps, hopefully, until the stars themselves faded.

The battle had ended. It was over. At that, Shield-Captain Ankelion felt only grim satisfaction. He stood there for some time, watching the once arch-traitor, frozen in the moment of her final defeat.

“Shield-Captain?” His second asked him after a measure of time had passed. He became aware that the others had approached the central area, wary of the witch where she lay and the giant standing over her frozen body. The length of the Spear marked the radius of the field, something the others accompanying him had no doubt been made aware of.

“It is done.” Ankelion spoke with finality. “Report.”

“The battle has turned,” Calpurius explained. “The moment she was defeated, the Grimm lost all cohesion. As we speak, the Lamenters and Greyshields are routing them.”

Ankelion nodded. Past him the Headmistress walked, stepping right up to the edge of the stasis field. She regarded the arch-traitor, the bubble of suspended time she had been encased in.

“Is she-”

“Dead? No, not exactly. But she may as well be, locked within a bubble of time for eternity. She will not escape.”

The Headmistress said nothing. She spat at the witch, the spittle slowing and freezing midair, never to reach its target. The woman turned and walked away, toward the font where it lay on the ground. She picked it up, clutching it to her chest as she sat down in the one undamaged chair amidst the local chaos of the battle’s aftermath. She seemed to be on the verge of tears, but Ankelion knew that he was a poor judge of mortal emotion. The Sister Superior that had been following her Battlemarked to him. We’ll take care of her.

Ankelion nodded. He had questions to ask of the woman, things that the ebb and flow of battle had not allowed for. The nature of the font was one, the mark of the Sisters Sororitas on her right cheek was another. But they could wait for another time.

Captain Theosius and the rest of his squad were there as well, his gaze focused on where the arch-traitor had fallen. “My brothers have been avenged,” he spoke, barely above a whisper.

“Indeed, Captain.” Ankelion turned to the Astartes. “Your Crusade is over.”

The Captain turned to look back at him. “It is.”