Encased within a cocoon of ceramite and plasteel, the embryonic sac jostled within its artificial womb. A collection of distended vertebrae, the remnants of plasma-scorched flesh…What had once been power and purity and perfection had been reduced to a desiccated slab of fibrous tissue and neural mesh. The sting of adrenal stimulants combined with the outward din of meandering techno-litanies could only mean one thing: he was waking up.
Not that the dreaming world had been a calm one. The perpetual clamor of shuffling ceramite plates, the whine of snarling chainaxes and the bark of bolters echoed throughout the timeless void. Sometimes, if Cyclon was especially unlucky, he would relive the memories with unerring acuity. The phantom pain was most troublesome then. He was whole again, savoring the lactic burn and the occasional breath of unfiltered oxygen. Then, as quickly as the memory came, it subsided, spreading thin like oil upon the water’s surface as the the ravaged War Hound was reborn as an Eater of Worlds.
A champion, they called him. Cyclon gurgled into his aspirator, angrily wrestling within his prison of amniotic protein; if only his so-called brothers could see him as he truly was. He braced for the impending agony, the violent union between fallen angel and baroque pain-engine. The ritual came to a head, the Leviathan stirred.
⁂
Cyclon, the Woeful, towered above his genehanced brothers as the they would a human child. Some spat at his feet, wads of acidic phlegm eating into the ash-coated soil, and cursed the ancient one for his Terran heritage. Others bowed their finned helms respectively, or perhaps intuitively, governed by some unseen instinct to submit to the adamantium behemoth; even predators wavered in the presence of a hunter. Regardless, all stood aside, parting like blood-sodden seas before the ancient one's advance. Cyclon stalked forth, armored legs tearing into the crumbling earth, and great siege-clawed arms swung in measured arcs at the dreadnought’s sides. The chassis had been constructed in a time even before the Great Crusade, an unknowable variant of the fabled battle-sarcophagi reserved only for the greatest heroes of the Legiones Astartes’. Cyclon didn’t feel like a hero. He was a tool, an engine of destruction unlike anything else within the burgeoning Imperium’s arsenal, a fact that disgusted the disembodied veteran on a variety of fronts.
“It was betrayal then.” Cyclon’s booming voxmitters offered little in the way of subtlety or secrecy. He spoke plainly for all to hear, but mostly to the captain of the 23rd Company.
Lukrin answered in equal flatness, “It had to be done.” He was the best spoken among the snarling Eaters of Worlds, though the nails punished him harshly for such temperance, “The Primarch demanded it, Cyclon.”
Cyclon continued walking, his titanic strides forcing Lukrin into a jog, “You need not beg me for forgiveness nor understanding. I am a thing to be unleashed, am I not? My council was not required and never has been. The proper channels mean nothing when tethered to Angron’s leash.” Pity had no place within the ceramite prison, only spite and rage, briefly quelled by tongue-lashing of his brother-legionaries. In truth, Cyclon despised them. His lumbering form groaned with discontent every time he beheld their scarred scalps and the grotesque protrusion of cables that were the nails. He’d been interred even before the legion’s reunification with their broken Primarch, too little of him left to undergo the installation of a pain-engine. Those damned nails.
They sacked their way through Ultramar in a savagery typical of the World Eaters. Though the planet of Calth had been taken easily enough, the Ultramarines proved far more tenacious than initially estimated. Cyclon reveled in the carnage, however, despite his lack of corporeality. The Ultramarines were everything the World Eaters weren’t; honorable, disciplined, reserved. In the defiance of his foe, Cyclon grew to despise the weakness of his own kin. The dreadnought was not so different from them, really, as he shared the in the same bloodlust that had afflicted the younger generation, yet theirs was a self-imposed torment. Even as they shattered the gilded chains of the Imperium, the World Eaters had chosen indefinite servitude to a much more intimate master, one whose influence could never be bucked or broken: the butcher’s nails. Cyclon was free. He suffered still, yes, but he suffered because he would always suffer. There was nothing left besides it. I’m a brief lapse of control, Cyclon’s locus of thought cemeteries upon his sundered flesh. The icy embrace of sustaining fluids and the slosh of bloated internals. They had chosen to become Angron’s slaves, chosen to cast aside the history and traditions of a once respectable brotherhood. It was this difference that drove Cyclon mad, or rather further mad, during the campaign on Calth. It came to a head at the siege of Athlek.
⁂
Athlek was a sprawling bastion of Imperial architecture, a monument to the Ultramarines and the honor of the Emperor Himself. Cyclon found himself enraptured by the cityscape, its tall spires of glass and steel rising out of the ash-choked clouds. If he closed his eyes, the dreadnought fancied he could smell the burnt ozone and taste the sulphuric pollution on his artificial tongue. Such fantasies were short-lived, however, as the Eaters of Worlds began their assault in earnest. The 23rd company swarmed across the ruins, cleaving and rending with abandon, while Cyclon hung back at Lukrin's side.
"Look at them, Lurkin.” Cyclon rumbled, gesturing to the World Eaters with his siege claws, "We are not warriors. We are animals." Lukrin ignored the dreadnought, as was his custom, opting instead to lead the charge against the Ultramarines defenses. Cyclon followed, though reluctantly. The city burned beneath the Eater's onslaught, and Athlek's defenders fell to the blades of those who should have been their brothers. Cyclon watched, transfixed, as his gene-kin tore through the ranks of blue-armored storm troopers. He observed their brutish forms, hunched over and gnawing at their foes, and marveled at how low they'd truly stooped.
As the battle wore on, Cyclon found himself growing increasingly distant from the violence unfolding around him. He was tired. So very tired.
All of his true kinsmen were dead, mercilessly casted against the unfeeling walls of renegade civilizations who’d resisted compliance or decimated by their own kin an effort to appease a fractured Angron. The Terran sons of the XIIth legion were all but extinct, replaced by a brood of savages so eager to please their genesire that they would stoop to even greater acts of fratricide; stories of Istvan III still lingered on Cyclon’s mind. Betrayal. These were the wayward dogs that he had forsaken his few remaining scraps of dignity for. These slavering things. The occulobes of his helm glowered with renewed hatred, a briny, frothing pool of enmity that drowned the apathy like an unwanted runt. If Angron’s dogs wanted blood then Cyclon would make them choke on it.
“You mongrels. A few wires in your skull and you’re reduced to this. Such disgusting weakness.” Speakers blared, interrupting the savagery of the battle-frenzied legionaries and blanketed the decimated courtyard in a veil of silence. They looked to the ancient one as confused children, oblivious to Cyclon’s impending diatribe yet subconsciously aware of its implications. While the World Eaters were many, the dreadnought was of a class unto itself, an apex apparatus of destruction rivaled only by its larger cousin-machines, Imperial Knights. Cyclon loomed over Lukrin, towering above his gene-brothers and casting a shadow over the ruinous battlefield, as he raised a claw skyward. The ceramite appendage trembled with rage, knuckles popping and grinding with barely contained fury. Yet the speech never came. What were words to dead men, to prey? Cyclon evened the tri-clawed fist at his targets, “Ave Imperator.” His second, final death would be on Athlek, amongst the ruins of a once prosperous people and their broken defenders, bathed in the blood of brothers; that would be enough, more than Cyclon deserved, even. Beyond this pathetic rabble were even more of his erstwhile kin. The hunt would be good, until the gore clogged his treads, until his nutrient bath boiled from the intensity of his sarcophagi’s overclocked reactor.
Lurkin was not even allowed a scream as his power-armored form was crushed like ann aluminum can within the dreadnought’s grip. Ruptured vitals strained through the peeled rents of the crumpled form in a sloshing waterfall. This was a captain of the XIIth, a veteran of untold conflicts equipped with some of the finest materials his legion could spare, yet in the grasp of the Leviathan all of his accolades meant nothing. There would be no parades or songs sung of the captain’s fall. Not that they would’ve been sung amongst his kin anyways. No, Lurkin suffered an undignified end at the deathless war-engine’s claw. Slabs of meat and sundered scrap fell to the ash-caked rockcrete in wet smacks, each gory plop punctuating the veil of silence. Cyclon turned, slowly, deliberately, towards the rest of the company. Lukrin had been his favorite, and his death was as unceremonious as they came. The Eaters of Worlds relished any chance to satiate the nails’ never-ending agony, flinging themselves upon their elder brother with wild disdain.