Summary: Mortarion and Shyama do some kissing and touching, carefully. (No Nails AU, Mortarion/OFC, nsfw-ish but the WIP randomly cuts off before they actually get that far)
I know you’re out of the fandom, but darn, I still was so happy to discover all this in winter of 2014.
Me: I’m not in this fandom anymore
Me, also: I have twenty more fics and I keep writing new ones oh god why can’t I stop oh look another bunny
You wander through the ruins of a once mighty city. There you see a man grinning at you, wearing a rusted crown.
You ask him why the fuck would he wear an iron crown. And how the hell he got it wet enough for it to tarnish. At least gilde it so the outside looks gold and it doesn’t tarnish. What the fuck.
He gets really defensive about it, like weirdly defensive. Oh, oh, he says, oh, I’m sorry I don’t, like, carry gilding materials around. Sorry I’m not prepared like you. Where’s your crown, huh? You don’t have one? I didn’t think so. Watch yourself.
The Rediscovery of the Primarchs
Probably a metaphor for how the ‘Great’ Crusade was lowkey a giant clusterfuck, or something.
Summary: Mortarion and Shyama do some kissing and touching, carefully. (No Nails AU, Mortarion/OFC, nsfw-ish but the WIP randomly cuts off before they actually get that far)
***
‘Do they hurt?’
‘No. Most of the nerves are dead. It was a long time ago anyway.’
‘Then can I touch them or would you rather me touch somewhere you can feel it better?’
Mortarion was sure he’d be blushing if his skin could show that. ‘We can go slowly.’ That was what they were doing, right. And it wasn’t so strange she might be interested in his scars, however they looked. Shyama was a medicae as well as a toxicology researcher. She was in the habit on having a professional interest in such things.
He wasn’t cold, he only had his shirt and cloak off, he wasn’t in the middle of a snowdrift or anything, but he shivered anyway when one of her small hands cupped the more heavily scarred side of his face. He couldn’t feel the skin itself, but many of his scars were deep and he could feel the pull of all the scar tissue under the surface on his muscles.
He knew what his scars felt like. Rough, shiny, twisted and discoloured skin over knots of damaged or dead tissue, fibrous ridges of keloids where they’d healed particularly badly that still twinged or itched often. She didn’t look disgusted, but she was hardly going to be squeamish.
‘You can touch too.’ She did blush. ‘If you want to.’
He put a hand on her shoulder and it curved halfway around her back, but it felt much too awkward to move lower. How had humans been managing to get any further than this since the dawn of time? It was so difference from the normal distance he kept from people.
Her dark brown skin was smooth and his hand looked so pale to almost be grey in comparison. She had pulled off her shirt and unhooked her bra in a few smooth motions, but he wondered if she was as nervous as he was, if it was really alright to touch too boldly. She wasn’t pressing herself against him or whatever lewd things people did when they were overcome with passionate sexuality.
She traced down his face and neck to his chest. Her hands were tiny in comparison to the span of his shoulders. He could feel the pressure even if the textile details of the touch were distant. She followed some of the oldest scars, the ‘Y’ across his chest and shoulders. Too clean, too precise to be a battle-scar. He didn’t want to explain about the Warlord.
‘Are you looking to replicate a chemical formula that you know must exist?’
‘No,’ he said, and it was nice she didn’t make him say it outright, that she could put two and two together, of course she could she was brilliant. He didn’t have to say ‘the xeno that raised me used to cut me open to see how I worked without anaesthesia because nothing worked on me’, she could figure it out.
She kissed his shoulder, then the other, but didn’t trace those scars. Mortarion was glad. He didn’t want them to be part of this; this thing with her, his life as it was now.
She was soft and squishy under his hand as he experimentally moved a little lower. The give of her body felt nice, but he didn’t want to press harder lest he hurt the fragile mortal. She made a squeaking sound as he cupped one of her breasts with two fingers. He thought that was a good noise. He ran his thumb over the curve of her breast lightly and she made it again. ‘Keep doing that.’
He hadn’t expected human woman to feel like this, bouncy curves unlike the unyielding planes of muscle he was used to. He’d known they had higher percentages of fat stores than men, let along Astartes, but he’d had little experience to guess what that would feel like before he’d had his hands on her and the layers of glandular, adipose, and connective tissues under the skin he was touching.
Along with way more information than he had ever wanted to know, Guilliman had included a few useful suggestions he thought they could try. Kissing down the curve of Shyama’s stomach, he could at least be confident he wasn’t going to hurt her if they did this, though he worried he wouldn’t know what to do and she wouldn’t like it.
The sounds she was making definitely didn’t sound like she disliked it, and he felt a warm jolt in his groin as well at that, which he ignored for the moment.
Summary: Russ reminds himself to walk on two legs, to pretend to be human. Some days are easier than others. (gen, sfw, where the heck was I even going with this snippet?)
***
There was no time in the artificial sterility of a spaceship, or so they said. Leman Russ wanted to know who ‘they’ were so he could have words with them. He forced the urge back, though. There was no mechanical change in temperature or humidity or oxygen level or anything, and picking a fight would only leave some very confused tech-priests.
None of this helped his bad mood. It was mostly being in the very annoying position of wanting to be a different person than who he was. It would be nice… it would be easy to be someone else. Someone for whom being human came naturally, who took it for granted and didn’t have to think about it.
Or at least an inscrutable bastard like Guilliman or el’Jonson. This wasn’t like him either. If he was happy, he laughed. If he was sad, he shed tears. Such as proper.
Did he care about anyone else’s opinion now? He didn’t think so. He was only annoyed at himself for visibly showing changes in behaviour over something he’d already decided to ignore.
Thinking about thinking. Humans.
His pack brother, the blinding reflection of sun off clear ice, scolded him like a puppy. If you chase your tail, it’s your fault you’re hungry. Hunt when hungry, sleep when not.
When there are biting flies, you hit them with your tail, he countered.
So easy to be a wolf. To not struggle to shape his thoughts into words, as though sound meant something. To be light and free—letting the ideas go past pure an unfettered: he knew what he meant, and all the colours and smells and textures as they were, no cages of words, words, words.
That would be easy. An easy way to live and easy for him to achieve. But he’d chosen to be a man. He was a man.
Some days that didn’t even feel like a lie.
Some days, but not today.
Pacing didn’t help drain the tension and excess energy. If he’d run the length of a continent and fought a kraken, that might have burnt off some steam.
He wanted to drop on four legs, but that would be a stupid affectation. His arms weren’t the right length for that. His legs felt wrong, though. He wasn’t physically capable of being clumsy, but his body never felt like his. No matter how often he unthinkingly reached out a forepaw, his body knew to interpret this as moving a leg and not an arm or dropping him onto his face.
Well, it left him no more off-balance than he always was. He was always aware of the distribution of his weight. Just because no one else had the strength or speed to take advantage of his instability the way he used his sense of balance against anyone he wrestled with didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It was inherent to being a biped. Top-heavy, swaying on two spindly legs. Walking by balancing on one foot and momentum. Humans. Didn’t even have the sense to have a tail.
I– He laughed at himself and shook away the body language that would have told a wolf he was about to make an announcement. He couldn’t say those concepts as a wolf because it wasn’t a wolf thing to say. Humans had words for it. ‘I wish Dýrhildr would stop flirting.’
Spending time wanting things to be different than how they were. Human, human, human.
Poor Leman. Can’t be a wolf and can’t be a man. Trying to make your thoughts sound like mockery so you don’t have to admit you’re indulging in self-pity.
Humans who used wolves as a metaphor anthropomorphised them so. No, most of the things attributed to wolfishness were humanness. Being a wolf was easy. Hunt when hungry, sleep when not. Most things revolved around food, for that matter. Risk your life hunting because you’ve got to eat, but risk as little as you can. Fight off competitors in your territory, because they’ll take your prey and you and your mate and your pups need to eat.
Blood-thirstiness was far more common in humans, without the help of the foaming-mouth disease. The Wulfen, those poor monsters, were no wolves. That was humanity without restraint. Wolves weren’t that stupid. Live another day. Self-sacrifice, putting your life on the line for things other than food and pups, that was human foolishness. The burn of ambition too, the need for conquest his father had built into him, the wolf didn’t understand how or why anyone could have or would want a territory too large to defend personally.
But humans, because of their eccentricities more than despite them, were stronger than wolves. That was the first thing he’d learned about humanity, when the Russ had killed or scattered his birthpack. His mother had known better than her pup (her fur white and soft as fresh fallen snow, the smell of milk and the east wind). We do not hunt them by preference, but the cold is long and we starve. Humans, he would learn, would seek revenge, and they would do it over and over until those they’d decided to kill were dead. They would throw themselves on their enemies to drown them in corpses if they needed to, and there were so very many humans.
It would never occur to a wolf to herd their prey into buildings and keep them close and feed them hay and oats and increase them until they needed them. Humans got more food from their islands than a pack could have, so they fed more pups. They made fangs of iron and fur of pelts. They made wolves into dogs, wolves chained to their wills and made to die for their reasons.
Summary: Lion of Olympia meets Luther, in Leman el’Jonson’s bed. (homeworld-swap AU, Leman/Lion, Leman/Luther, PG-13)
***
Lion scowled at the Astartes taking undue liberties without his lord’s leave. Jonson was asleep, or possibly pretending to be, but did that permit a subordinate to be so casual and without reverence?
‘You will note,’ the Astartes replied as he finished removing his armour and lay down next to Leman, on the far side of Lion, ‘that this is my bed and you are the one intruding upon it. I am graciously allowing that because it was my beloved who invited you.’
Lion was unsure where the border was between unselfconscious arrogance and offended pride. He was not skilled with interpreting sarcasm or banter. He was not used to anything but wide-eyed, slack-jawed awe from Astartes, but he’d also heard that they were inclined to gossip about how their primarch was better than others, so perhaps this did happen regularly behind his back.
He didn’t like having potential enemies, but he would rather have what even he could guess with some confidence was open hostility than a good deception up until he was stabbed in the back by a jealous lover.
Yet Luther–for this must be Luther, the upstart–showed no resentment towards his lover or reluctance to curl against his side. He was never sure when someone would decide to kill a spouse’s lover while still clinging to the spouse, kill a spouse and ignore the lover, or kill both. Luther grinned to show off fangs. There was always a hint of something wild and animal about Space Wolves, however much they polished their armour and trimmed their beards.
Leman murmured in his maybe-sleep and pulled Luther closer against him. He didn’t roll away from Lion, but he felt colder anyway. It occurred to him how strange it was that someone might be jealous of him when tomorrow, and from then on, it would be Luther having Leman and Lion not.
(And no one would ever look at him the way Luther just had at Leman, some part of him said, his conscious mind unable to parse its meaning but something deeper found it significant.)
Not that he wanted the boisterous, annoying knight. What Leman had dragged him to bed to do to him had been enjoyable enough at the time, but in retrospect it had been wet and messy and rather embarrassing and he disliked how his brain had short-circuited and he’d been reduced to shouting his passions while his treacherous body arched and shook around him.
Still, some part of him wondered how they would look together, if Leman rolled Luther over right now. He thought they’d fit together well, the immense bulk of the primarch covering and enveloping the other man completely. He wondered how careful they’d be, how soft, because only another primarch could have taken the force Leman had used with him that still left him sore. He wondered how much like warriors they’d be, pushing challenging, fighting, exalting in each other’s strength, fingers and teeth digging into one another.
Leman el’Jonson didn’t seem the sort of be embarrassed in any way. He certainly wouldn’t bother to throw his audience out first. If anything, he might drag Lion over and offer to share, which he heard some people did. He could almost imagine Luther rolling his eyes at something Leman said, but leaning back against him anyway and drawing Lion in.
He felt embarrassed? sick? to be fantasising like that, but Leman’s arm flung over his stomach tightened as he moved to pull away. ‘Mhm hum,’ Leman mumbled eloquently.
‘He means “Don’t go”,’ Luther translated.
‘I rather would. I’ve been accommodating enough.’
‘I’ll bet,’ Luther muttered quietly, eyes on him, but louder he said, ‘He’ll tackle you and try to sleep on you next.’
He groaned. ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’
‘He is that way.’ Luther punched Leman in the shoulder, and there was no way he was really asleep.
‘Why?’ He immediately regretted the question, afraid just asking it gave too much away.
Luther gave Leman a long, fond look. ‘I don’t understand him either, and you’d think I would if anyone did.’
Lion felt an unusual moment of kinship in commiseration, but he pushed it away. This was a stranger and it meant nothing. This brother of his blood he at least had a potential bond with, though he’d seen enough fratricide on Olympia to know better than people’s insistence about how important family should be.
He supposed he preferred his sons to of the Ist Legion to any other company. But he would tolerate this company for now. Begrudgingly.
Summary: An Iron Warriors Successor Chapter and their Slaaneshi rituals. (Daemon Prince Guilliman AU, OCs (OMC/OMC, OMC/OFC), nsfw, consent issues/dub-con, drug-use)
***
‘If it couldn’t happen to anyone, there’d be no point in having a lottery. Even the Chapter Master.’ Dargas clenched his jaw and glared, but held steady. ‘If the Chapter cannot manage without me for six years, then it has been organised wrong. I could die in battle at any time. First Captain Karsten, you have the Chapter sooner if more temporarily than expected.’
‘Yes, sir.’ She saluted sharply, keeping as much from her face as she could. She didn’t hate him, but she had no love for him either, and Dargas never treated her as anything but a subordinate to be ordered around. She was likely more popular than he was, because he didn’t care about popularity, but as long as she got the job done.
‘Chaplain Formion, I am at your disposal.’ He would need to get used to saying those words a lot.
‘Then let us speak privately, Chapter Master. While you are certainly aware of what accommodation entails in our Chapter, unlike a neophyte, there are mysteries and procedures from the other side that you have not needed to know. We will talk, you will be consecrated to Slaanesh, then your duty may begin.’
‘Dismissed, all of you.’
*
‘This duty is not supposed to be onerous,’ the Chaplain had said. ‘It is not supposed to be unpleasant or degrading. It is sacred. You are sacred, as a vessel of the Dark Prince.’
‘Take the drugs,’ he had also advised. ‘We are iron. We can endure, but as one devoted to the spiritual well-being of the Chapter, I can tell you there is a difference between a pleasant task and an unpleasant chore. It is not weakness. It is a step to ensure the spirit is in the right place as the body.’
He’d taken the drugs, though it still felt like an admission of weakness. They did make everything fuzzier, make him hot and cold all over, make the way Formion kissed send sparks all through him. It took a lot to make an aphrodisiac that could affect Astartes, but they hadn’t embraced Chaos yesterday.
The drugs helped the time pass faster, and helped Dargas feel anticipation rather than dread when he heard someone approach the temple of accommodation.
He’d made use of the accommodator before, but in recent times he’d been more likely to order Karsten to his chambers, or Karsten and Bessut, captain of the Second Company. He was hardly unaware that his two captains preferred each other to him and were submitting to him only out of a sense of duty, because that was what you did. It was easiest for all of them when he left the two of them to their devices where he could watch.
Neither of them came to him now, and he wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disappointed by it. On one hand, it confirmed his belief that they didn’t want him personally. On the other hand, it helped keep his role as accommodator and his real life as Chapter Master very clear and separate.
Others came to him, though. A sergeant from the Seventh frustrated at being spurned in favour of a rival in leading an assault. A Librarian who wished to commune with She Who Thirsts. A whole squad celebrating a victory together. A young Scout, nervous and wanting to know how this was done so she wouldn’t embarrass herself with her peers.
Some touched him gently, some callously, some firm and some unsure, but even at their worst they never hurt him too much. They were still battle-brothers and -sisters, of one Chapter, not enemies. Besides, it could be you next.
They came to him: men, women, those of blended form that evoked the face of the god of pleasure. They fucked him, or he fucked them, or they made use of his mouth, his hands, his body. This was what it meant to be the accommodator, the sacred prostitute of Slaanesh: to be used for sex by anyone in the Chapter who wanted him, without all the complications of social relationships. Someone you could always go to, even if you were unloved in all the galaxy, if you didn’t want to be alone.
So he accepted them and pleased them. The man who missed his most beloved brother, dead in battle these past twenty years, and liked to have his hair stroked just so. The woman who fucked him with a strap-on until he ached, wanting someone to take her anger at the world and not call her weak or pitiful for it. The boy newly promoted to full battle-brother, still uncertain in his new body and how it felt, whose every armour interface port Dargas licked and nipped at before sucking him off.
Chaplain Formion spent time with him as often as his duties permitted and Dargas wasn’t in demand for his favours. Not for sex, but to talk. They discussed philosophy, architecture, Chapter business, if the Apothecaries should change the dose or composition of the drug cocktail Dargas injected in his veins. He was accessing his mental and emotional state, obviously, making sure he wasn’t being misused and no hatred at the role was growing in him. Sometimes the chaplain held him and slept beside him.
Dargas wasn’t about to say as much, but that was the best part, the part that made the role seem more pleasant than even prosecuting war as Chapter Master had been. That someone cared so much about him, personally, and wanted to make sure he was content. It was only his duty as a chaplain, not anything that would persist once his six year term ended, he didn’t delude himself, but it was pleasant to have.
Summary: Marneus Calgar visits an old friend. (Daemon Prince Guilliman AU, Calgar/OFC, PG, WIP snippet)
***
The village at the coordinates Calgar had been given has no landing pad, but there was so much nothing around it that a designated one was hardly necessary. ‘Avoid the sheep,’ he told his pilot.
Despite the lack of modern conveniences, only very small children were staring openly. They were not exactly feral worlders, so much as lacking industrialisation. Some part of him wondered why they didn’t want to better themselves, to innovate instead of using scraps of imported technology, but he supposed some people were happier wandering with their herds than living in a city, and living in small numbers on a world with few resources, the future the same as the past. The naked toddlers, too old to be carried in a sling by their mothers but too young to work were playing some sort of game on dataslates as new as could be found ten years ago on Konor.
The most solid building around, though still a portable structure, had a place of honour beside the bloodstone circle. It was obviously a forge from the smoke it was belching. Calgar needed to duck through the doorway in his armour, but he could stand up inside.
Pele was unarmoured, and for that matter wearing nothing but a leather skirt. That was hardly atypical among the locals, but a normal blacksmith would be wearing an apron, were she not a Space Marine. Or at least gloves; even knowing she didn’t strictly need them, some Ultramarine part of Calgar winced just on principle at why someone would do something so unnecessary and easily avoidable as stick her hands in open flame, but it was a Salamander affectation. The heat was by no means that of an industrial forge, but it was noticeable and she was hardly sweating.
Half-finished master-crafted stormbolters laid scattered around, covered in oiled cloth to keep sand from delicate, precisely calibrated inner workings. That was not what she was working on.
‘Nails?’
‘My apprentice is sick and if nails are needed today for the new sheep pen, they’re not going to wait for tomorrow and they’re not going to make themselves.’
‘A destroyer plague?’
‘A flu.’
A human apprentice then. He didn’t sigh, because it was just their way. When he’d once asked why she didn’t live at the fortress-monastery, she’d asked whatever would she do there? What would the point of spending time at home be? She could take the bike out back and be there in no time. She also taught the children reading and writing and such things; she, the noble Chapter Master of the Abyssal Flames.
‘My dear Marneus, if it were urgent, you wouldn’t have come in person. Let me finish and freshen up.’
‘My apologies.’ He backed from her tent and went to walk the perimeter of the town. He felt the warm feeling in his hearts just from seeing her. As Guilliman had written, everyone should have someone who made them feel safe, an advisor they could bear their soul to. He had other advisors and Chaplains and Chapter Masters, but he’d missed her personally. He was Regent of all Ultramar, but she was a dear friend he could let that drop around.
‘Auntie’s calling you to her tent, sir,’ a small girl told him as a chill began to fall and braziers were lit.
Her tent was the largest, that she could actually stand in it. Just now she was kneeling, adding charcoal to her brazier. He sat before her.
Her dark eyes were lined with gold paint that shined against her olive-brown skin. She wore a nicer cream skirt and still no shirt. She had added a significant amount of jewellery: gold bangles around her wrists and ankles, rings on fingers and toes, bands around her neck, chains tying her hair back in smooth oiled loops, and a wide pectoral of a winged ultima symbol above her heavy breasts.
‘I did not realise before now, but you’re clearly not from the same ethnic group as these people. You’re an islander, yet you live with the desert dwellers.’
He knew the planet Cractau had two distinct ethnic groups: those who wandered the desert of its one continent and those who lived in the long chains of volcanic islands. Both were very dark, but with distinct variations of skin tone and hair and features he could easily differentiate.
‘Have you ever,’ she said with a hint of a smile, ‘lived through a tropical monsoon season? I spent my whole childhood wanting to get off the boat. That’s why I became an Astartes.’
He smiled back. Thank the gods for that.
‘What weighs on your mind, Marneus?’
‘Can’t I find any excuse to see you for love of your company?’ he teased, but there was business he intended to discuss with her. ‘I would ask a favour of you as well, both your advice and your intervention. I require the Hammers of Ultramar and the Saffron Wardens for pushing back Imperial aggression in the northwest, the incursion into Khorne’s Reach, but you see the potential for conflict there.’
‘In that they get along like Iron Warriors and Imperial Fists? Naturally. You want me and my warriors along as a mediating influence, without seeming like you’re treating them like squabbling children who need babysat?’
‘Precisely. The only other force I can spare in the area are the Crimson Lotus, and I can barely trust them, let alone trust them with anyone else.’
Summary: Thiel summons a daemon. (Daemon Prince Guilliman AU, post-Heresy, PG-13, Guilliman/Thiel, remix of that time I wrote Marneus Calgar doing this same thing in this AU)
***
Of course they had wanted an excuse, but fear they would be too eager was half of what made them delay so long. Of course they were uncomfortable with an untested theoretical in their repertoire. Of course they wanted him back, personally.
But the price was too high, the contingencies too dangerous unless things already couldn’t get much worse. So they waited.
Now, here Chapter Master Aeonid Thiel was, the blood of the innocent staining his gauntlets as red as his helmet still was. It would have been comforting to have been one of the sacrifices–it would have been easier–but that was a foolish thought. He was the commander. By directing troops they were more than the sum of their parts, so his life did have more value than that of a line-Astartes. There were wounded who could be used instead, the deaths they would have had anyway given meaning. Practical.
He had insisted that he kill the children, though. Let this be on his head. It was his decision. He was the one who wanted this enough, personally as well as tactically. He went through with it.
Maybe someday they’d be so good at magic that they’d be able to summon a daemon without the murder of the innocent, like a fusion power plant to a barbarian tribe’s first water wheel. But in the theoretical in which they understood the metaphysics of the galaxy just then, it was unavoidable. The very fact it was wrong was what gave it the power to split apart reality. It had even been theorized it worked best when performed by someone who hated it, who wanted more than anything else not to do this, to find another way, but did it anyway, compared to someone who found it easy to justify the practical as necessary or who valued human lives little. A good man. If he had been able to call himself a good man before, which he hadn’t, he certainly couldn’t now; yet, it pained him deeply–that he could say.
It rose out of the blood and shadow, out of the battlefield where they had fought and out of the ritual slaughter that had been constructed for this purpose alone. A daemon. A primarch.
His troops felt no fear so didn’t fall back, but they watched, wide-eyed and curious, already with a wonder what was part awe and part frantic contingency planning. Thiel stood before them. He wasn’t up to trading a joke with his First Company captain or ruffling the hair of his Chief Librarian like he normally would have to put them at ease, and they knew what this moment meant to him, if the still-dripping blood hadn’t been enough to make them morose.
He found himself second-guessing himself. Was he lying to himself in wanting to believe he would instinctively know the truth, like in a fairytale? Had his transhuman memory failed him and it had always been this terrible, or had it truly changed? Had the daemon prince always been that much daemon and that little human? Had it always hurt to be near it so much, and had its growl made the earth shake? His old warding tattoos pricked with its presence, as if he hadn’t noticed he was in the presence of a daemon and needed to be informed. His Librarian had to look away quickly, her eyes bleeding.
“Aeonid Thiel,” hissed the daemon, in a voice that left fire and frost in the air at the same time. It glanced at his armour insignia, as if it needed them to remember what to call him. Not a sergeant anymore, he thought, not hysterical at all, no. “Chapter Master.”
It remembered him, then? Or it was pretending. “Lord. My primarch.”
“How long has it been?” Guilliman asked. He was staring at Thiel’s face with those blue, blue eyes, taking in details, scanning the other Marines of the Crimson Blades Strike Force. Long enough for Thiel to have aged, aged visibly despite his transhuman biology. For these young boys and girls he did not know to gain veteran studs.
“Four hundred twenty-six years,” he said. He would have counted every one even if he hadn’t had perfect recall. Longer than the Great Crusade had lasted. It had conquered the galaxy, yet it was a blink of the eye. No wonder it had fallen apart so fast, even longer ago. Such a fool the Emperor had been, and his primarch sons. They were all dead now, dead as the Crusade; the Imperials forever, the Chaos-sworn less permanently.
“Come here, Aeonid,” the daemon said, and Thiel went.
It was foolish. It was the easiest trick in the book. A daemon taking the form of what he most wanted to see, and then biting off his head. He’d seen it a hundred times before, happening to some poor, trusting fool. It was a powerful treason, and treason was a source of power. Guilliman himself hadn’t known if he would still be sane if he was called back, or if his reason would be lost to a daemon entirely in the service of the Great Powers. His First Company captain backed away slowly but pointedly, making it have to go slightly further to get to her, so she would be in a better position to assume command and coordinate a response in the event of his death from sudden but inevitable betrayal.
Yet he went, because he wanted to die that way oh so much. To have that illusion for a moment. If he was lucky, it would kill him so fast he wouldn’t even know better. If it decided to nurse more ritual power from him fully understand he had been had and dying slow, he would still treasure the minute of daydream enough to die happy.
The daemon pulled him to his chest, put an arm around him, claws scraping the armour plate of his back lightly. He was real and solid, to the extend that could be said of Warp-stuff, which was neither of those things. He smelled like ozone and like armour polish. Thiel could feel his teeth, but it was only a kiss pressed to the crown of his head. A benediction.
“For your service, for your wait,” he said solemnly. Then, teasing, “For your operational efficiency.”
He knew, with absolute certainty and clarity, that this daemon loved him. This daemon that had been Roboute Guilliman. As long as he lived, when his soul was burning in hell, as it would, this fact would still be true–a daemon loved him, really and truly.
“I feel like I could take on the galaxy all of a sudden, lord.”
“Tactical briefing. Your theoreticals.”
“We call them the Harrowing…”
because by fate even the gods are cast down 