Soot drifted past the cockpit like snow, caught by thermal winds from decade-long fires. Ashur had forgotten when he last slept; the chronometer was the first tertiary system he’d jettisoned to preserve power.
His was a dead world, scorched from the crust-shattering passage of the arch-traitor’s forces. But the Brazen Sickle would not die, and so it walked. Alone.
A coagulated cocktail of endorphins and amphetamines pulsed through finger-thick spinal needles socketed into his back. The reactor flared inside the Sickle, its pulse kicking in time to Ashur’s heartbeat. A gossamer-thin sheet of ash shifted from the dented plating of the Errant-class war machine as he shivered within the confines of his Throne Mechanicum.
‘Picked clean, just like the last quadrant,’ he said aloud, closing his eyes for a moment, cortical implants connecting his body to the machine. He sensed, heavy in his left hand, the dead weight of the Sickle’s thunderstrike gauntlet. He felt hunger bite at his stomach, knowing the source to be the machine’s dwindling reserves of power. The time would come soon to shut down secondary systems. Like a fox in a trap, he would gnaw at his limbs in desperation to keep the House alive for just a little longer. He had to, for those who remained.
They lived in the shadow of a collapsed hab-dome. A hundred irradiated and malnourished souls. Men and women wrapped in rags. Children with skin like old parchment, too tired to fear. Ashur had crushed the beasts that crawled from the impact craters, boiling water with reactor bleed-heat. Once, before he sacrificed it to save power, he had played an old House hymn over the vox unit. He didn’t know their names, but they waved as he passed. That was enough.
The first comms-spike came at dusk: A sharp, surgical burst of binaric static. It was clean, brisk, Astartes. Ashur stiffened in his cradle of twisted wiring. The Sickle responded, engaging targeting auspex arrays, scanning the upper atmosphere. There they were, hulls brilliant and bright against the scorched sky. They had returned at last to reclaim the burning world left in their wake, to retrieve those who had survived despite everything. Ashur watched as flickering trajectory estimations bloomed across the display. Spiralling transports converged in flawless synchronicity, forming a pattern the Sickle’s databanks recognised at once:
Purgation.
He crested the rise as the burning dome collapsed in on itself. The Astartes were already among the pitiful, pleading survivors. They waded through slagged wreckage, heedless to cries for mercy. The Sickle parsed their encrypted vox channels mid-stride.
‘Tainted, all. Scatter the remains, by the Emperor’s will.’
Ashur’s emaciated fist clenched against the arms of his Throne. They were cleansing the planet. The thermal cannon embedded in his machine’s right arm flared to life in response to his heightened state. Alarm glyphs flashed as the thermal register alerted the gathered space marines. They swung their weapons about, and a tightbeam message crackled through Ashur’s aural interface.
‘Unregistered Knight. You are to disarm immediately. Eject your throne and prepare for the Emperor’s Mercy.’
Unregistered? House Vireshan had lost everything to defend this world. Masters and lords who had walked in the wake of primarchs, dead to protect forges long-since quietened. All that to be scratched from the records, all glory lost.
More shots rang across the ash-stained plains. The cries of innocents silenced in the fire of misplaced righteousness. From somewhere in the wreckage, the tracks of a tank, its hull bedecked in battle-honours, pulped bodies and ground bones.
‘Repeat,’ came the vox message. ‘Unregistered Knight, you are to eject your throne.’
Ashur exhaled as his hand thumbed the release catch studded into his configuration plate. Power returned to the Sickle—rushing through ancient circuits like spring meltwater. His vision dimmed, heartbeat thundering.
‘I am the Brazen Sickle of the thrice-honoured House Vireshan!’ The voxcast boomed from the Knight’s frame, shaking the very air, ‘and I will not bow my head to those unworthy.’
The Astartes responded instantly. Bolt rounds shrieked, cracking against the Knight’s hull as Ashur willed it forward. Actuators groaned, transmitting agony into his body like snapping tendons. He clenched his teeth and vented the reactor, channelling the surge into the thermal cannon.
Five marines vanished in a bloom of molten energy before Ashur drove into them like a steel-forged myth. His gauntlet caught a marine in mid-leap, pulverising him against a crumpled strut. Plasma and krak fire peppered his flanks, ripping free adamantine chunks. He didn’t stop. Nearby, a Thunderhawk rose in retreat. Ashur tracked it, ancient training returning as a targeting rune zeroed in. The sky became fire as the wreck spun away, trailing smoke and armoured figures. Too late did he see pulsing warning glyphs in his peripheral vision.
A Sicarian battle tank fired from the dome ruins. The Sickle’s thermal arm exploded in a burst of sparking steel and shrieking alarms. World-shaking pain shot through Ashur’s body, eclipsing the remedial injection of suppressants shot into his veins. He ploughed the Sickle forwards and plunged its crackling gauntlet into the tank’s armoured plates, tearing it open like wet paper.
Then the world erupted—plasma, heavy bolters, krak missiles. A shower of impacts rocked his Knight, stripping armour and vapourising circuitry. This would be it.
‘Dump systems,’ Ashur whispered. ‘Everything not mission-critical.’
Servos hissed. Lights dimmed. He sat alone in the dark, reactor core pulsing for the final time. He reached for the overload sequence.
A shadow crossed the Sickle’s viewport, a shadow clinging to the hull and aiming a pistol. A bolt punched into the cockpit, and Ashur’s last cries died mid-oath.
When they pulled his corpse free, the Knight stood dead and still, joined in death with those it sheltered in life. The Thunderhawks kicked from the cursed soil, jets igniting in a hurricane-wash of sizzling air. Dust and ash peeled, fragmented, and finally scattered from the pockmarked hull of the Sickle, revealing House Vireshan’s history-lost words:
We kneel to none but need.
