230 – THE OLD LION

The Lion mulled over the strange woman’s proposal. Give her a chance to prove herself an ally of humanity? To prove that the artefact was best left in her hands? 

Humanity. Not the Imperium of Mankind. He observed, noting the precise wording. Did she know he likewise found the Imperium of today downright abominable and instead focused on protecting humanity as a whole? Not the state, but the people. The dream of the Imperium was a dead and rotting carcass, feasted upon by the crows and daemons.

All that was left was to preserve what little was left. Humanity would survive, one way or another, even if the Imperium didn’t.

She claimed to be human. From before the Dark Age of Technology, from the ancient times of Terra. He recalled. Her name was intriguing, but not ironclad proof of her words. Who knew what rotten Noble’s secret vault now held the ancient relics that once belonged to Malcador the Hero? She could easily have learned the name there.

Though he admitted that it sounded convoluted. But more reasonable than her being a … newborn Perpetual? 

A Perpetual. Like the Emperor, Malcador and Erda and Vulcan. People for whom death was not the end, but merely a minor obstacle. 

He had never heard of one possessing a new body, though. They usually rebuilt their own bodies on instinct when it was destroyed. 

This woman claimed to have been just … floating in the Warp for ten thousand years until a suitable body was made available for her. 

There were some lingering problems in his logic, but the explanation was starting to become more and more believable. Though it was still some ways away from catching up to the much more believable and realistic explanation, she was lying.

Not that he could do anything about the latter. His gut was telling him she was being honest, but … he didn’t trust his gut as much as he used to. Not since Luther. Not since Perturabo. 

Still, it was at least worth hearing her out. Her words and attempts to convince him would either fill in the gaps in his understanding and convince him, or reveal the lies she was trying to hide. 

Either way, he would need a better opportunity to strike at her true body either way. So, making her let her guard down, convincing her that he was listening, and slowly getting convinced, would be a prudent strategy. 

“Very well,” the Lion finally replied, sheathing his blade as a sign of good faith but keeping his shield strapped to his arm. In most situations, the Emperor’s Shield was a weapon more dangerous than his power sword, doubly so because few could foresee its mysterious power reflecting their attacks back on them. “One hour. Show me what you wish. Do with that what you will.”

“Wonderful,” the woman exclaimed happily, clapping her hands together. The Lion stiffened, feeling something happening beneath the veil of the illusion, causing a prickling sense of danger to drive a needle into the back of his neck. He held still, though, merely squinting under his helmet as the illusion stepped closer to him. “Well, the clock is ticking, so let’s get to it. This planet is uninhabited at the moment, but the moon hidden beyond the thick canopy is quite the opposite, teeming with life, the kind I’m sure both of us find more palatable.”

The moon? Somehow, the Emperor sent him to the wrong planet? 

No, appearing on an uninhabited Death World and on the highly populated moon filled with civilians were starkly different. One would allow him to strike at a supposed weakness; the other … allowed him to strike up a dialogue, since his mere existence wasn’t a naked threat to the civilians she likely wanted to protect.

So you want me to talk? No, to listen? Is that it, Father? The Lion mused, his eyes following every twitch of a muscle in his opponent’s body. Then his eyes widened ever so slightly. The body was real now, no longer an illusion. The change had been so seamless, the preceding illusion so realistic, that it took him a second to catch on to the change. Rewinding his memories, he couldn’t for the life of him pinpoint the moment it happened. 

A show of trust. Just like his sheathing of his blade. 

Perhaps foolish, since he was of the mind that her primary advantage over him was that he couldn’t find and kill her if she kept conversing through illusions conjured up from far away. 

But she did not seem foolish. Quite the opposite. Did that mean that her illusion being replaced by the real body was much less of a vulnerability than he had assumed?

If it’s even her real body. He thought, eyes narrowing. She has the artifact. She made a clone of Fulgrim in seconds, so it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibilities that she had a whole army of clone bodies she could control from afar, or jump into when slain. 

If that were true, she might just be too annoying to kill. Perhaps impossible on his lonesome. Unless she was weakened by losing a body, or it took her a while to jump between them, she could easily make hunting all bodies down impossible. 

And he wasn’t even taking into account the fact that the moon orbiting this planet was likely where her base of operations was. He had only a Power Armour, his sword, his shield and some basic tools needed for hunting and survival. He had no way of getting up there, not if his Father didn’t guide him through the shadowy brambles again, which the Lion doubted he would. 

Even just entering his Forestwalking felt like it would strain him. The Shadow was heavy in this system, almost stifling even for him. 

A sharp spike of danger pierced his mind, making him stiffen and place his shield between himself and the source.

“And that is our way off this murderous green ball of death,” the woman said, glancing at him. His eyes caught a flicker of amusement in her eyes, her lips quirking upwards just the slightest bit, then it was gone, leaving behind a professional smile. “Through this ‘gate’ is one of my cities. I think taking a walk through it should be a good start towards allaying your doubts.”

He glanced at the gate, at the wound in reality. It was a portal, similar to the ones the Eldar used, but rawer. Those Xeno split reality, peeling back the threads to open a gateway. However, the thing before him felt more like a hole torn open, though not by an amateur. 

If he had to put it into words, it felt like the woman just didn’t want to bother doing it the elegant way, when she had the power to do it by applying the appropriate amount of brute force.

“A portal?” He questioned, peering through. On the other side, he saw an empty room, furnished like a luxurious lounge. He didn’t move to go through. 

“Not trusting the strange gap in reality not to dump you in the Warp?” The woman asked, smiling. “Rightly so, I doubt I would jump through a portal made by anyone I didn’t trust. It’s far too easy to just disconnect it and deliver the hapless traveller to a daemonic banquet. The alternative is going the old-school way though, and that would take too long, we wouldn’t even get there before the hour was up.”

“Wouldn’t words suffice?” The Lion asked. “I asked you to convince me.”

“Seeing is believing,” she said, shrugging. “My words would hold little weight without seeing the visual proof before your eyes.”

Father wouldn’t have led me here if this were a trap. The Lion reasoned, becoming more and more convinced that his Father wanted the strange Psyker as an ally, not dead. The Emperor had always had foresight beyond mortal comprehension. Or perhaps I am supposed to believe that until she reveals her true colours. 

Without another word, he stepped through the shimmering portal, making sure not to touch the burning edge where reality itself was seemingly smouldering from the strain.

A dozen alerts popped up in his armour at once, but nothing dangerous. The air was thinner, less humid, but breathable. The gravity was also dimmer, but it was still fit for human habitation. 

A moment later, the psyker, Echidna, stepped through behind him, and the portal hissed shut behind her. 

“Welcome to my little slice of the galaxy,” she said, striding towards a shut double door that she sent flying open with a flick of her wrist. “It’s only a single moon, with little over fifty million human inhabitants, but it’s mine and as of now, one of the safest places to live in the galaxy.”

“That’s a tall claim,” the Lion rumbled, stepping out onto the balcony beside her. His eyes roamed over the scenery, over the towering buildings reaching for the sky, all pristine and looking freshly built. Far below, vehicles rumbled down the streets, merchants peddled their wares in stalls at the side, and people walked about the sidewalk. “I doubt a single moon could be more well defended than Terra itself.”

“Ah, but you misunderstand,” Echidna said, a smirk playing on her lips as she turned to him. “Or perhaps we just have different definitions of ‘safe’. They don’t have to fear starvation, homelessness, or criminals. There is no organised crime, no nobles who can kill citizens on a whim, no cults preying on the unfortunate, no factories that work people to death. With the Shadow in place, Chaos can’t reach this System. Sure, the citizens of Terra might not have to fear alien invasions, but they have plenty of other things to fear. Just a few years ago, a Khornite invasion slaughtered millions, only getting stopped on the steps of the Imperial Palace. Though the machinations of nobles, starvation and disease likely claim more lives on Terra every single day than that invasion did in its entirety.”

The Lion had no counter to that. He could only feel a morose longing for the Terra that was lost, the Terra he knew and the one his Father wanted to create. The one Rogal wanted to rebuild to be beautiful, self-sustaining and livable to its people. 

The one that would never be. 

He wanted to deny her words as lies. He had not seen what had become of Terra with his own eyes … but he had seen what the Imperium had turned into in his absence. Terra had always been the beating heart of the Imperium, and when the body was so rotten, the heart, the very centre of it all, must have been worse than his most pessimistic conjectures.

 His eyes travelled up, towards the sky that was … fake? Yes. It looked real enough, but there was no depth to it, and he could see it curve downwards far too close for it to be the horizon. 

“We are inside an arcology, I see you noticed the ceiling,” Echidna said. “Kind of like a Hive City, or what a hive city was supposed to be. If I recall correctly, those horrid things were built based on half-finished designs from the Age of Technology. I’d like to imagine this would be similar to what the original designers pictured as their end goal, but realistically, it’s still in need of refinement. It beats hive cities, though.”

“How?” the Lion asked, playing along with the song-and-dance. Though he was somewhat interested, he was much more interested in the pride the woman was radiating as she talked. 

“The air filtration systems for one,” she said, taking a deep breath with a smile on her face. “No smog, no pollution. The air is as fresh and rich as in the depths of a jungle. Living space is abundant, electricity and freshwater are available to all. There is no Undercity infested with cults and mutants either, living in a permanent darkness and surviving on garbage.”

“Where do you get the resources for this?” he asked. He was no builder like Rogal, or a master of logistics like Guilliman, but he knew strategy, and he knew wars couldn’t be fought without supply lines. Likewise, a city couldn’t be built out of hope and thin air. It needed workers, materials, know-how and organisation.

“This nifty little artifact, those dreary Shadowkeepers would have been happy to keep locked up in a vault till the end of time, has many uses,” she said, waving her fingers on an outstretched hand, causing them to transform into longer white tendrils for a moment before returning to their original form. “I can turn a dead, diseased rat into a dinner fit for kings with a snap of my fingers, with this thing helping me. All I need is a source of biomass, and I can make anything, and it just so happens that this moon had an Ork infestation, which supplies me with an abundance of biomass. More than I know what to do with, really.”

“You are … farming Orks?” The Lion asked, a hint of bewilderment seeping into his tone. He didn’t know whether to be impressed or disgusted. Was she a moron or just inspired? 

It all depends on whether she can keep the infestation from boiling over. He decided, even though he was of the mind that the only good Ork was a dead Ork. They were a menace, an infestation that, if left unchecked, tended to spiral out of control and devour all that it could.

“In a sense,” Echidna said, nodding. “It’s not like I have to even encourage them to slaughter each other. They do that by themselves, and that leaves me with plenty of easy-to-harvest, high-yield corpses. Orks are much thicker in biomass than humans are, so a single one is worth dozens of human corpses. I can make a skyscraper like the one we are standing on out of a few thousand dead Orks.”

She built the buildings out of biomass? The Lion thought, his thoughts tinged with disbelief. He never knew the artifact was capable of such a thing. He had been led to believe it was made for precise genetic engineering, and to mould flesh like clay. I suppose that is what she’s doing … but this is beyond anything I thought the artifact was capable of.

There was a difference between turning regular humans into unique masterpieces built for war. The Emperor took hours to build each of his Custodians with the artifact. 

Yes, it was impressive … but it was not single-handedly building a hive city level impressive. The scale of it was just on another level.

But a hive city can’t fight on the level of a Custodian. He thought. There is a reason each of them is considered to be worth as much as a planet. Father had quality, but she has quantity and scale.

He also had to admit that to the regular people, having an arcology likely made their lives much better, while having a Custodian breathe down their necks would at best provide protection from violent harm.  

“Well then,” the Lion said, his thoughts still lingering in the past. “Lead the way. You promised a … tour?”

“I did, didn’t I?” She smiled. “Sure. Let’s go then, though I’ll put an illusion on you, if you don’t mind? A ten-foot-tall super soldier covered in power armour might make people a bit afraid. No need to scare them needlessly.”

The Lion nodded, and the woman waved her hand. He saw no change, but she merely gestured to a standing mirror to the side.

A tiny, six-foot-tall elderly human with a rough copy of his face stared back at him. He looked unassuming and frail, the type of man that would get lost in a crowd were it not for the steel in his eyes. 

He did not like the image, his mood souring at the sight of the frail old man in the mirror. She was playing with him, knowing he loathed the fact that old age was starting to weigh him down. 

She wants me to accept the rejuvenation treatment. He thought darkly, but suppressed his annoyance. If he could trust her, he would have accepted, but therein lay the problem. He couldn't trust her, and it wasn't just stubbornness on his part either.

He was one of only two Primarchs. The only two beings in the galaxy who might still save humanity. He could not risk subjecting himself to a treatment he couldn’t control, one that might change him in unexpected ways. He knew that artifact, if he gave her the opportunity, she could just as easily turn his entire body into a slurry as she could return his youth to him.

Too dangerous. Too risky. Not worth it. It would be downright irresponsible to take that risk.

His age was not such a massive problem yet; he could still fight; his mind was still sharp. He was not desperate enough to take risks this great. Not yet. Preferably never.

“Lead the way,” the Lion said, and frowned at the much frailer voice that left his mouth. 

When he turned back to her, she too, had put on a disguise. Her hair turned brown, and her eyes lost their gem-like lustre. 

“Come on then,” she said, gesturing for him to follow as she led him out of the lounge. “I think we’ll start with a short walk down the street, then head down to the greenhouses on the lower levels before checking out the residential levels.”