CH. 1 - Salvage

I wake up half a man, hanging in the dark, and my first coherent thought is that I still haven't finished my prayer.

That bothers me more than the rest of it. The rest of it is fairly simple: I'm cold past the point where cold means anything, I can't feel a single thing below my fourth rib, and something enormous has its fist closed around what's left of me. Iron talons, each one longer than a mortal man, holding me up in the black like a trophy. My right arm is stretched out above my head, locked stiff, and somewhere at the end of it my sword is still buried to the crossguard in the skull of the thing that killed me.

Killed. Let's be honest about the word. There was a sound at the end, like a hull tearing, and it came from me.

So. Dead, mostly. Hanging in the grip of a dead abomination, on a dead ship, surrounded by my dead brothers. Forty-one of them. And me, apparently too stubborn or too stupid to finish dying, looping the same prayer over and over because it's the only thing in this tomb that still works.

Emperor of Mankind, receive Your servants. Receive Brother Dietmar. Receive Brother Vairich. Receive —

I lost count of the days somewhere around eleven. The chain on my wrist still holds me to my sword. Good. A Templar who lets go of his blade has bigger problems than being cut in half.

The light shows up on what might be day nineteen.

At first it's just a grey smear through the frost on my lenses, and I honestly assume it's the end coming to collect me at last. Then the smear grows voices — deep, rumbling voices, mangling Low Gothic through some snarling hill-dialect — and my surviving heart does something embarrassing and lurches like an old engine turning over.

"...Allfather's teeth. Look at it. Look at them."

"Blade through the skull. Straight through the sarcophagus, brothers. He put his sword through the murder-machine's coffin and let it die around him."

"And it took him with it." A pause you could bury someone in. "Half of him, anyway."

And then — I swear on the Throne — one of them starts singing. Chanting, low and rolling, hammering words into rhythm like a smith drawing out a blade. It takes my frostbitten brain a moment to understand that the giant is composing a saga. About me. Right now. Some nameless knight of the long dark who slew the iron beast and was carried by it into death, sword-bound, oath-bound, unyielding even as—

I groan.

The verse stops like it's been shot.

"...Bjarn." A younger voice, delighted beyond all decency. "Your corpse is alive."

"He can't be."

"He's ruining your saga, Bjarn."

"He can't—"

There's an argument. Movement. A cold blue eye-lens fills my vision, set in a helm crested with iron wolf-fangs, and some distant part of me thinks: Space Wolves. Of all the Chapters the Emperor could have sent, He sent the barbarians. Someone says the word wrist. Someone else says stand clear, which is never a phrase you want to hear while dangling from something.

A bolt-round goes off above me like a god clapping once, and the world lets go.

I fall — a long way, claw and all, twelve metres or more through dead air — and the last thing I register before the black takes me again is a stupid, satisfied little thought: the chain held. The sword came down with me.

As it should.

After that, fragments. Lamplight. Someone prying iron talons apart with a chainsword and zero respect. A voice near my ruined face, old and cold:

"Sus-an coma. Deep one. That's what kept the meat alive — but the meat's half a man, Hakon. Waste of a good stimm."

"It's the Priest's stimm to waste, pup. Look at the frame on him. Look at the service studs — two hundred years in that flesh if a day, and some of it cold-slept, or I'm a kaerl." Something jabs at my neck, hunting for the interface port with an old surgeon's rudeness. "And if I'm right about what wakes up when I do this, step back."

A sting.

Then fire. Not pain — furnace. Something detonates in my chest, an organ I've carried for two centuries without once feeling it, and it drags both my hearts screaming back into rhythm like it's personally offended they stopped.

Far away, the cold voice says, sounding smug: "There. Belisarian heart. No firstborn wakes like that. He's one of the new-forged. Primaris — and old with it."

I try to say the gene-seed, save the gene-seed.

I get about half of it out before the dark wins again.

I wake up properly in a room of red light and hanging chains, and the first thing I notice is the smell: counterseptic, engine oil, and wet dog.

Weeks. I've lost weeks. I get the facts in pieces from the ancient one-eyed monster who keeps rebuilding me — Hakon Iron-Tooth, Wolf Priest, black armour hung with fangs and little vials, the kind of man who mends your body and weighs your soul with the same terrible gentleness and doesn't tell you which one he's doing. The ship I'm on is the Wyrmslayer, strike cruiser of the Great Company of Ulvar Stormbrand. The ship I was on — the Vow Eternal, three hundred souls, forty-one battle-brothers of the Karrivan Crusade — is a tomb they're towing behind us.

"You died well," Hakon tells me, checking the sutures where my flesh ends. "Inconsiderate of you to stop."

I look down the slab at what their Iron Priests have made of me, and my stomach drops further than my legs did.

From the waist down, I'm Fenris now. Augmetic legs of dark adamantine, heavy as anchor chain. And etched — I stare, genuinely hoping I'm hallucinating — with runes. Wolves. Serpents. Heathen wyrd-signs winding down both shins to my brand-new iron feet.

"You've marked me with witchery," I say. My voice comes out like a ruin.

"We've marked you with ours," Hakon says, completely unbothered. "The runes are prayers, Templar. They just don't grovel." He sets a tray beside me. "These were yours."

My chainsword first. Cleaned, re-toothed, the wrist-chain neatly coiled like someone actually respected it.

I take it up before I take up anything else, because after two centuries some habits are older than thought. My hand knows the grip. My thumb finds the activation stud on its own.

I press it.

The sword screams.

Not the sound — the sound is just the ordinary snarl of the motor kicking the teeth around the track. It's the other thing, the thing underneath, the thing you only feel if you were raised from a boy to feel it. The machine spirit wakes up furious. It comes through the grip and up the bones of my arm like a live cable, a hot animal wrath with no words in it, only meaning, and the meaning is unmistakable: where were you.

Nineteen days it hung in the dark with me, buried in the skull of the thing that gutted us both, and it did not stop. It did not once stop. And now its wielder has the gall to wake up on a heathen slab reeking of wet dog and touch it like nothing happened.

The teeth howl. The whole weapon shudders in my fist, straining against the chain, and for one heartbeat I honestly think it means to turn on me — and then it knows me. It settles. The rage banks down into a low, resentful growl, the growl of a hound that has decided not to bite the master who left it out in the cold, this time. The vibration eases back into my palm like a grudging handshake.

"Easy," I tell it, under my breath, and thumb the stud off.

Behind me, one of the Wolves lets out a low whistle. "The dead one's blade near took his arm off," Bjarn says, to nobody, delighted. "Its temper's worse than mine."

I set it down carefully. With respect. It has earned the respect.

Next to it on the tray: a stasis-vial small enough to hide in my fist, one point of cold light inside. A progenoid. One. Forty-one brothers, and between the Enemy's butchery and the void's long cold, the Wolves pulled exactly one intact gene-seed from my dead.

One.

I don't trust myself to speak for a while, so I look at the third thing instead. My crusader's cross — black iron on a leather cord, worn smooth by two hundred years of gauntlets, pressed into my hand at my first vowing like ten thousand identical crosses pressed into ten thousand other hands. Nothing special. Every Templar has one.

Except it's warm.

In a stasis-chilled apothecarion, in the void, the little iron cross sits in my palm faintly, impossibly warm — and it's the only thing that came off the Vow Eternal without a single fleck of the Enemy's filth on it.

Hakon watches me take it with his one eye narrowed, and says absolutely nothing. Somehow that's worse.

When I can walk without sounding like a collapsing scaffold, they come for me. Two Grey Hunters as escort — one of them Bjarn, the saga-writer, radiating grievance in my direction like a small weather system.

I'm expecting a cell. I get a feast-hall.

Firepits burning recycled promethium. Long trestle tables of scarred bone-white wood. A hundred giants in storm-grey watching me walk the entire length of the hall on legs that ring against the deck like tolling bells — thank you, Iron Priests, very subtle. At the high seat sits Ulvar Stormbrand, Wolf Lord, white-maned and amber-eyed, built like a cliff that got up one day and decided to be a problem. There's an empty place at his right hand, and in front of it, a full drinking horn.

The interrogation begins with alcohol. Of course it does.

"Sit," says Ulvar. "Drink. Then talk."

I know what's in the horn. Mjod. The Fenrisian brew that kills mortal men outright and embarrasses lesser Astartes — and the whole hall has gone quiet to watch the rigid son of Dorn refuse it. I can feel a hundred wolf-grins waiting.

So I sit. I raise the horn to the cross at my neck, say, "To the Emperor, God of Mankind, in Whose sight my brothers died," and drink the entire thing to the dregs.

Silence.

Then, somewhere down the hall, a young Blood Claw missing two fingers starts hammering the table like he's trying to break it, and the whole hall comes down in noise.

The questions come sharp underneath the roar. Who am I? Adalric, brother of the Karrivan Crusade, two hundred and six years sworn, Primaris-forged, cold-slept through the worst of the Rift years. What took my ship? The Rift-storm first — ripped the Vow Eternal out of the crusade fleet like a page out of a book. Then the boarders. Heretic filth of the Arch-Enemy, and the iron abomination that walked with them: a Helbrute, a traitor's corpse nailed alive into a walking engine. What did I do about it?

My vows.

"Your dead weren't shy about it," Ulvar says. "We read the decks. Your forty-one made the traitors pay threefold." The amber eyes narrow. "But we read something else in the low decks, Templar, and I'll hear your account. Lights. Green as marsh-fire, cold as wyrd. My Hunters watched them dance down the killed corridors and go out the moment anyone looked. That's no heretic's work I know."

I take my time with that one.

"I saw them too," I say finally. "In the last hours. I took them for my own dying."

Which is a lie, or at least a haircut on the truth. What I actually felt, watching those cold green ghost-lights drift through my brothers' tomb, was the very specific sensation of being watched. Observed. Measured. Found — and this is the part I hate — interesting. I am not saying that out loud in a hall full of strangers, so I don't.

Hakon Iron-Tooth has been circling the whole exchange like a crow. Now he stops in front of me and asks the only question a Wolf Priest actually cares about:

"Why do you still live, Templar, when your god let forty-one of your brothers die?"

The hall goes quiet for that one. Even the Blood Claw stops hammering.

"Because my vow isn't finished," I say, and I set the stasis-vial on the table between us — one point of cold light in all that firelight. "Forty-one brothers, and this is what remains. One seed of Dorn's line. I will carry it through the Rift and the night and whatever your heathen hells hold, and I will put it in my Marshal's hands, so a brother not yet born can finish what the Vow Eternal started. The Emperor didn't spare me, priest. He tasked me. There's a difference, and I intend to be worthy of it."

Hakon studies me for ten heartbeats. Then he turns to his lord and says, simply, "He'll do."

Ulvar Stormbrand rises, and the hall rises with him. "Then hear my judgment. We're bound for war, Templar, not for your crusade — but the Allfather's winds cross all wakes in time, and until they cross yours with your brothers', you'll have a deck to stand on, a wall to fight beside, and a place at this fire." Then the wolf-grin comes out, all teeth, and I know I'm about to pay for the drink. "The saga demands a name. Bjarn's already chosen it. To spite you for living."

Down the table, Bjarn raises his horn with the expression of a man committing art and revenge at the same time.

"Adalric the Sundered," he declares, "who was cut in half — and declined to notice."

The hall roars. And that's it. That's me now. Adalric the Sundered, forever, because a Fenrisian deed-name can no more be taken back than a scar. I bow my head exactly one centimetre and hate it with my entire remaining body.

That night I stand alone at an observation port and watch the Wyrmslayer's guns give the Vow Eternal to the Emperor. The old ship burns briefly and brilliantly against the dark — a candle at the end of a funeral — and goes out. I stand my vigil on legs of pagan iron, one hand closed around a cross that has no business being warm, and for the first time in nineteen days plus several weeks, I pray the prayer all the way to its beginning.

Receive Your servants. Task the one You kept.

The stars don't answer. They never do.

But the cross, very faintly, burns on.