Chapter 298: The True Name of a Daemon
It began with a vision.
Reality warped, peeling away like scorched parchment to reveal a void thick with the stench of sulfur and carrion.
Stoffer beheld a monster.
Curved horns, like thorns forged from blackest iron, coiled from the sides of its gargoyle-like visage. Behind it, vast, leathery wings unfurled with the sound of scraping hide, their membranes stretched taut and tipped with barbed claws that made its silhouette all the more menacing. Each exhalation was a plume of foul smoke, and sparks of brimstone guttered between its teeth.
And its eyes—a demonic yellow, like molten gold drowning a corrupt soul—were locked on some unseen foe.
Its body was wreathed in a halo of blood-red vapour, a mist that churned and twisted, momentarily forming the screaming, silent faces of the damned. Stranger still, the blood that seeped from its wounds was a holy silver, the mark of some paradoxical curse that allowed it to sneer in defiance of the wounds inflicted by the dogs of the False Emperor.
Stoffer knew this creature.
It was no common daemon, no lesser thing spawned from the whimsical cruelty of the warp. It was something far greater. It was the apotheosis of mortal flesh, boiling emotion, and rapacious ambition, fused perfectly with the essence of a daemon to forge the pinnacle of damnation.
It was Stovrelet of the Eightfold Path.
It was a Daemon Prince.
Stoffer's fingertips trembled, not with fear, but with a twisted resonance. The same fire burned beneath his own skin.
He was it. He had been remade!
BOOM!
The wasteland trembled beneath his feet. The cracked earth split, fissures spreading in every direction like desiccated veins. Blood flowed in the crevices, pooling into viscous streams that stained the broken rock a dark crimson. Black smoke, laced with the stink of sulfur, billowed from the crust, painting the sky a sickly orange, as if the entire plain had already been dragged into a daemon's realm.
Drip… drip…
Blood trickled through the seams of his armour. Iron sabatons stepped into a pool of gore, sending ripples across its surface.
Hal of the War Hounds walked onward.
"Blood for the Blood God!" The roar tore through the thick smoke.
A World Eaters Champion burst from the roiling fog, the crimson livery of his Tartaros-pattern Terminator Armour gleaming in the firelight. His charge was impossibly swift, his momentum unstoppable. The heavy plate seemed fused to his very flesh, and each footfall cracked the ground, the advance of a berserk beast clad in steel.
CRUNCH!
A shriek of tortured metal mingled with the wet thud of pulverized bone. A power fist swept out, annihilating a body in a spray of viscera. The sheer force sent limbs tumbling through the air, painting a brief, crimson arc in the smoke and tearing through the gloom with a sound of shocking violence.
Hal of the War Hounds walked onward.
Drip… drip…
Gobbets of flesh and clotted blood slid from his greaves. He took another step, entering the blood-pool.
A Daemon Prince lay broken within it.
Its horns, once hard and sharp as blades, were snapped. The bones of its skull had been shattered by a power fist, the jagged edges bursting through torn flesh. The silver blood flowing from the web of cracks across its body had already filled the crater in which it lay.
"I have no time for reunions."
The War Hound's ceramite fingers clamped onto the Daemon Prince's fractured skull, producing a sickening, grinding sound as he hauled it from the mire. The creature's body, once as massive and powerful as a grox, was now as limp as a butchered carcass.
"Tell me, where is he? And what new name has his new master given him?"
A plume of white vapour escaped the War Hound's vox-grille, scraping across the Daemon Prince's ruined face. Silver blood trickled from its eyes, nose, and mouth.
"Stoffer. Captain of the World Eaters Eighth Company."
The daemon's wrecked form convulsed. It let out a hissing gasp, as if pierced by the sound of its mortal name, its broken claws scrabbling uselessly in the gore. On its bronze pauldron, the XII Legion icon had been reshaped by Chaos into a literal, monstrous maw, from which steam and blood now wept. The mouth was mumbling something.
"We are not so different now, Hal."
"Hah," the War Hound scoffed.
Ignoring the fallen creature's provocation, he turned. His iron heel ground shattered bone underfoot as he began dragging the broken body back toward his lines.
This wasteland, tainted by Khorne, was a treacherous, distorted place. The air was a red mist that tasted of rust, and the phantom sounds of unending battle-cries and clashing weapons echoed from the distance. Hal glanced up. Beads of blood were slowly coalescing on the cavern roof above, staining the entire dome a diseased, dark red that stretched into an infinite, bloody sky.
The most unnerving feature was the spatial distortion. From the outside, the altar was a mere few square kilometers. Once entered, it became a battlefield without a horizon. The Imperium's most advanced auspex arrays were completely blind to the anomaly, as if the entire region had been severed from reality by some esoteric power.
Hal flexed his mechanical fingers, adjusting a Blackstone device on his forearm. As he turned a dial counter-clockwise, the roiling blood-mist receded like a dying tide, revealing the faint, iron silhouette of a bastion ahead.
It was a fortified camp.
The golden-and-crimson Primarch stood impassive on a central platform, his gaze locked on the constantly twisting scarlet vortex in the air above. From time to time, Grey Knights would leap from the vortex, each one dragging a roaring, struggling Khornate daemon. The moment they drew near the camp, the shrieking creatures were yanked into unseen, psychic cages.
Yet the Primarch remained focused, his concentration absolute, as if he were disassembling the phenomenon with his mind, searching for a specific thread in the tapestry of madness.
"My lord Ramesses," Hal reported, his voice a clean vox-burst. "I have not failed my charge."
The Daemon Prince, now little more than a heap of broken flesh, was thrown at Ramesses's feet.
'I knew it,' Ramesses thought. His decision to expend resources on recovering loyalist elements from the Traitor Legions had been the correct one. The bonds forged within those Legions gave them an unparalleled ability to find their own. Still, mindful of the lingering influence of their fallen Primarchs, Ramesses had chosen the candidates with extreme care.
"You have done well."
He signaled to the Shield-Captain monitoring the communications array to recall all Grey Knights from within the rift. Ramesses then placed a hand on Stovrelet's gore-caked brow. The creature let out another hiss of steam and a gurgling roar of pain.
Among the sacred rites of the Grey Knights was one that allowed them to glimpse the True Name of a Greater Daemon. A daemon's True Name was the key to its existence, the shackle upon its very essence.
To know a daemon's True Name is to hold absolute power over it. It is to know the core equation of its being, allowing one to unmake it with a word. It is not a simple moniker like 'Ka'Bandha' or 'Kairos Fateweaver'. A daemon's True Name is a conceptual ideogram, a litany of its most vital memories and defining moments, spoken in a language no mortal tongue was meant to form. To utter it is to enforce a fundamental truth upon the daemon, bringing it to heel or unravelling it entirely.
The Grey Knights could perceive fragments of such a name by psychically linking with those who had witnessed a daemon's most pivotal moments. For daemons whose origins predated humanity, this was a matter of pure chance. For the Daemon Primarchs, however, whose lives were a matter of historical record, the task was far easier.
Like Angron.
Others might not know, but Ramesses did. Nuceria. That was the world where the tragic primarch had finally been forced to surrender his soul to Khorne.
And now…
Ramesses stared down at the dying Daemon Prince at his feet. Thanks to the shard, he had found his witness to that moment.
"Tell me," Ramesses commanded, his eyes blazing with a brilliant, psychic gold that burned into the creature's soul.
"Tell me everything you know."
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