Void Stalker Read Online Free PDF Page B

he craved was one last chance to be right, to show that he’d not wasted his entire existence. The rebellion against the Emperor – that war of myth that you call the Horus Heresy – was over. We’d turned against the Imperium that sought to punish us, and we’d lost. So we ran. We ran to Tsagualsa, a world outside the Imperium’s borders, away from Terra’s Beacon of Light that he claimed still stung his eyes.’
    He gestured at the grey world. ‘We ran here, and here is where it ended.’
    Octavia’s breath left her lips as mist. ‘You fled a war you lost and constructed a castle of torture chambers. How noble of you, Talos. I still see no lesson in it.’
    He nodded to that, conceding the point. ‘You have to understand that by the end, the primarch was riddled through by madness. He cared nothing for the Long War, wanting nothing beyond bleeding the Imperium and vindicating his life’s path. He knew he was going to die, Octavia. He wanted to be right when he died.’
    ‘Septimus told me of this,’ she said. ‘But raiding the Imperium’s edges for couple of centuries at the behest of a madman, and slaughtering entire worlds, is hardly a lesson of worthy ideals.’
    Talos watched her with his soulless eyes unwavering. ‘In that light, perhaps not. But humanity has to know fear, Navigator. Nothing else ensures compliance. By the very end, when the Screaming Gallery was the Legion’s war room and council chamber alike, the primarch’s degeneration had devoured him from within. He was rendered hollow by it. I still remember how regal he looked to us, how majestic our father was to our adoring eyes. But looking at him was like growing used to a disgusting smell. You could forget the foulness, just as you can ignore the scent, but when something reminds you of it, you perceive it with renewed strength. His soul had rotted away by the end, and on some nights you could see it in the flash of his dying eyes, or the bleak shine of his teeth. Some of my brothers asked if he were tainted by some outer power, but most of us no longer cared. What did it matter? The end result was the same.’
    The lights chose that moment to flicker and fail. The warrior and the mutant remained in darkness for several heartbeats, illuminated only by the eye lenses of his armour and the grey glare from the screens.
    ‘That’s happening more and more lately,’ she said. ‘The Covenant hated me. The Echo seems to hate all of us.’
    ‘An intriguing superstition,’ he replied. The lights, dim as they were, came back on. Talos still didn’t continue.
    ‘And the assassination?’ she prompted.
    ‘The assassination came soon after, when his mad clarity was at its height. I have never seen a creature so placidly delighted by the thought of its own destruction. In death, he would be vindicated. Those who break the law must be dealt with in the most violent, lethal way, as an example to all who would consider betrayal. So he set us butchering across the galaxy, breaking every law against reason and rhyme, knowing the Emperor would prove the point all too well. The assassin came to slay Curze, the great Breaker of Imperial Law, and she did just that. I saw him die, vindicated, pleased for perhaps the first time in centuries.’
    ‘That’s grotesque,’ she said. Her heart quickened at the thought he would take offence, but her fear was unfounded.
    ‘Maybe so,’ he nodded again. ‘The universe has never seen a living being that loathed being alive as much as my father. His life was broken in seeking to prove how humanity could be controlled, and his death was a sacrifice to prove that the species was ultimately wretched.’
    Talos withdrew a hololithic orb from his belt pouch, and thumbed the activation rune. A life-sized image of flickering blue light manifested before them both. A figure rose from an unseen throne, its hunched, feral posture still not entirely stealing the beauty of its muscled physique, or the savage nobility in