THEY CALL IT the Season of Fire.
The Ash Wastes are choking with dust from roaring volcanoes. Planet-wide, the picts show the same images, over and over. Our vessels in orbit watch Armageddon breathe fire, and send the images back to the surface, so that those there might witness the world's anger in its entirety.
Fighting across most of the world is ceasing, not because of victory or defeat, but because there can be no arguing with Armageddon itself. The ash deserts are already turning dark. In a handful of days, no man or xenos beast will be able to breathe in the wastelands. Their lungs would fill with ashes and embers; their war machines would grind to a halt, fouled beyond use.
So the war ceases for now. It does not end. There is no tale of triumph and victory to tell.
The beasts stagger and crawl back to cities they have managed to hold, there to hide away from the Season of Fife. Imperial forces consolidate the territories to which they still lay claim, and drive the invaders out from those where the orks have managed to grasp no more than a weak hold.
Helsreach is one of these places. That necropolis, in which one hundred of my brothers lie dead alongside hundreds of thousands of loyal souls…
That tomb-city, so much of which is flattened by the devastation of two months' road-by-road warfare, with no industrial output left at all…
Imperial tacticians are hailing it as a victory.
I will never again understand the humanity I left behind when I ascended to the ranks of the Templars. The perceptions of humans remain alien to me since the moment I swore my first oaths to Dorn.
But I will let the people of this blighted world claim their triumph. I will let the survivors of Helsreach cheer and celebrate a drawn-out defeat that masquerades as victory.
And, as they have requested, I will return to the surface once more.
I have something of theirs in my possession.
_____
This time, when the cheers come, they are shaped by the orator. He uses the title I swore to High Marshal Helbrecht, standing before Mordred's statue, that I would not refuse when it was formally awarded to me.
'I am told,' the High Marshal had said afterwards, 'that Yarrick and Kurov have spoken with the Ecclesiarchy. You are being given the relics, to carry Helsreach's memory and honour with you, in the Eternal Crusade.'
'When I return to the surface, I will offer the icons back to the people.'
'Mordred would not have done so,' Helbrecht said, masking any emotion, any judgement, from me.
'I am not Mordred,' I told my liege. 'And the people deserve the choice. It is for them that we waged that war, for them and their world. Not purely for the holy reaping of inhuman life.'
And I wonder now, as they chant my new title, what they will decide to do with the relics.
Hero of Helsreach, the crowd cheers.
As if there is only one.
в общем под конец гримальдус уж очень стал недоволен братьями ;)
