Victories of the Space Marines - By Christian Dunn Page 0,1
scored the heavens with a tracery of silver fire. In every direction the landscape was dark and glossy, cut from unyielding rock and glinting dully in the flickering light. Acid pooled across the jagged edges, hissing and spitting as it splashed against the Astartes’ armour. The four Space Wolves ran south through narrow defiles of jet, each worn down by millennia of erosion, each as pitiless and terrible as the ice-fields of Fenris in the heart of the Long Winter.
This world was angry. Angry with them, angry with itself. Somewhere, close by, Ravenblade could feel it. It was like the beat of a heart, sullen and deep. That was the sound that had drawn him here, echoing across the void, lodged in the psychic flesh of the universe. Something was hidden on Gath Rimmon, something that screamed of perversion.
And it was being guarded.
“Incoming!” bellowed Varek, halting suddenly and sending a volley of bolter fire into the air.
Ravenblade pulled out of his run and swept his staff from its mag-lock. His helm-display ran red with signals—they were coming from the sky. He spoke a single word and the shaft blazed with fluorescent power, flooding the land around.
Above them, dozens of creatures were flinging themselves from the high rock, talons of stone outstretched. They were carved from the same material as the planet, each of them crudely animated creatures of inorganic, immutable armour. Eight spindly legs curved down from angular abdomens, crowned with extended rigid plates for controlled gliding. At the end of the metre-long body, wide jaws gaped, lined with teeth of rending daggers. They plummeted towards the Space Marines soundlessly, like ghosts carved out of solid adamantium.
“Fell them!” ordered Svelok, his storm bolter spitting controlled bursts at the swooping xenos. The rounds all hit, sparking and exploding in showers of shattered rock. The Wolf Guard made killing look simple. A shame, thought Ravenblade, that he had no time for anything else.
Varek’s bolter joined in the chorus of destruction, but some xenos still got through, wheeling down and twisting through the corridors of fire.
For those that made it, Lokjr waited. The massive warrior, his armour draped in the pelt of a white bear and hung with the skulls of a dozen kills, spun arcs of death with the whirring blade of his frost axe.
“For the honour of Fenris!” he roared, slamming the monomolecular edge in wide loops, slicing through the glistening rock-hide and tearing the flyers apart as they reached him.
Watching the carnage unfold, Ravenblade grasped his staff in both hands, feeling the power of his calling well up within him. The wind spun faster around his body, coursing over the rune-wound armour. Acid flecks spat against his ancient vambraces, fizzing into vapour as raw aether rippled across steel-grey ceramite.
“In the name of the Allfather,” he whispered, feeling the dark wolf within him snarl into life. The runes on his plate blazed with witchlight, blood-red like the heart of a dying star. He raised the staff above his head, and the wind accelerated into a frenzied whine. A vortex opened, swirling and cascading above the four Space Marines, billowing into the tortured air above them.
“Unleash!”
A column of lightning blazed down from the skies. As it reached Ravenblade’s outstretched staff it exploded into a corona of writhing, white-hot fire, lashing out from the Rune Priest in whip-fronds of dazzling brilliance.
The surviving flyers were blasted open, ripped into slivers by the leaping blades of lightning, crushed and flayed by the atomising power of the storm. The Rune Priest had spoken, and the creatures of Gath Rimmon had no answer to his elemental wrath.
As the last of them crunched to the ground, Ravenblade released the power from the staff. The skirling corona rippled out of existence and a shudder seemed to bloom through the air.
By contrast with the fury of the storm, the Rune Priest stood as still and calm as ever. Unlike his brothers, his pack-manner was stealthy. If he hadn’t been picked out by Stormcaller, perhaps the path of the Lone Wolf would have called for him.
Kilometres above them, the natural storm growled unabated. The planet had been cowed, but remained angry.
“Russ damn you, priest,” rasped Svelok, crushing a fallen flyer beneath his boot and crunching the stone to rubble. His helm was carved in the shape of a black wolf’s head, locked in a perpetual curling grimace. In the flickering light its fangs glistened like tears. “You’ll bring more to us.”
“Let them come!” shouted Varek, laughing harshly over the comm.