Oathbreakers. Betrayers. Traitors all. Bane choked on acrid dust through the shattered vox-grill of his helmet, blood trickling from his exposed nose and falling to the upturned dirt in thickening globs. The stench of heresy permeated the air like a fume, as though the stink of burning plasteel and promethium and scorched flesh was not enough. Broken shells of ceramite lie strewn about the battlefield like discarded, dismembered dolls; from the rich seafoam of Horus's Sons to the royal purple of the Emperor's Children. The corpses of world eaters also speckled throughout the battlefield like blood-stained pearls, of their number he was most concerned.
Luck was a thing of the ill-prepared and undertrained; Bane was neither. Someone, somewhere, had to be rallying the disparate survivors, or at the very least hosting a rendezvous for the traitors. Bane's priority was to sate the pain-engine above all else.
Bane rose to his feet, gauntleted fingers clutching at the gore-clogged clainaxe as it sputtered for clearance. He gunned the motor, eliciting a satisfactory gargle from the weapon, and pressed into the storm.
“Kalphon…Targos…” The sergeant barked into the ruined vox-caster, “Caphelon.” More than likely, Bane's squad had been killed in turncoat ambush – which meant there were still alive among those who opposed Him - but if anyone survived this hell then surely Kalphon?
He heaved the bulk of his wargear forward on a shattered knee, shambling through the chaos in search of kin and prey alike. Amongst the countless fallen astartes, capsized Land Raiders jutted from greedy sinkholes in half-sunken wrecks, plumes of fire and smog rising from their gutted chassis and into the soot-choked heavens. The occasional las-blast and bolter bark rang out somewhere in the distance, followed by the low thud of detonation. Bane could not tell which side the sounds belonged to, and he could not muster the energy to care. The pain had become all-consuming, an eternal torment that gnawed and tore at him like a starving dog. “Kalphon…Targos.” A string of saliva dribbled from his chin and into the recesses of his fractured faceplate; radio silence persisted.
The crippled World Eater had stumbled for hundreds of yards until a new sound began to rise above the sifting dunes. Barks, chants and exaltations cried out in the Legion’s adoptive tongue of Nucerian. “Lady of the Red Sands! Butcher of Men! Angra! Angra! Angra!” Dozens, no, hundreds of voices lifted into the haze in one unified chant, rising to the heavens as though to beseech their mistress to battle. Bane quickened his pace, dragging his useless leg with all the strength he could muster. The wound sergeant rounded a dune and found a small valley of carnage and the craven vultures so proud of their cowardly deeds.
Bane watched as they slaughtered the loyalists element with reckless abandon. They picked the wounded apart with whirring blades and power weapons alike, hacking their fallen brothers to pieces as they cheered like sniggering jackals.
At the heart of their congregation towered the unmistakable figure of a Primarch. Their Primarch. Bane could never mistake the hunched silhouette of his gene-mother for anything or anyone else; was this what the enemy had felt on their countless, previous conquests? A mad demigoddess shambling forth from the ashes, ready to slip the leash at any moment with gnashing axes in tow?
Angra was broken, more so now than the sergeant could ever recall seeing, but he was not so naive to believe it a recent phenomena. She had been broken before the Heresy, before her Legion had been found to be lacking. No, Agra had been broken even before the Empress had torn her from the sands of Nuceria and forced a horde of longing sons upon her.
The Red Angel's musclebound figure shuddered and switched, thin streaks of white pulp trickling from each nostril; burrowing tendrils of alien circuitry had already begun to gnaw at her frontal lobe, faster than even her augmented healing factor could accommodate. While the facade of serenity played upon Angra's scarred features, Bane knew it to be a lie. Primarch of the XIIth Legion, Eater of Worlds — their mother — would never know peace and neither would they, but satisfaction was owed.
“Traitors!” Bane revealed his position with a throaty roar, “Turncoats! Betrayers of kin and the Empress alike!”
They could've picked him apart from the short distance that separated them, but where was the thrill in that?
The gladiatorial spectacle so common amongst the XIIth legion reigned and duels were the most sanctified of sport. Bane's chainaxe sneered at the crowd. His eyes burned beneath a porcelain mask of cracked ceramite and hot tears of salt mingled with blood collected at the sergeant's feet in dusty pools…The pounding had turned to a repetitive mule-kick within the loyalist’s skull; louder than the day he’d willingly subjected himself to the whirring of surgical blades and the soul-rending agony of implantation. “Die!”
The crack of a bolter paled before the condemnation of steel, meat and bone at the maw of a chainweapon. The first challenger came, a scarred World Eater whose armament had been all but shredded off in some unknowable conflict. His armor bore the insignia of a centurion, yet the mangled mess of flesh and metal that protruded from his shoulder made a mockery of the station. The traitor was unarmed, ambivalent to his wild disadvantage. Bane swung in a unsuspecting, downward stroke, catching the blood-drunk World Eater at his sternum and ate into his heart. The World Eater fell in a twitching, bloodied heap.
Another took his place, a hulking brute whose right pauldron had been shorn off, and the flesh beneath flayed and cauterized into a gnarled, black mass. Bane had met him before, perhaps even trained him before the betrayal. This was a veteran not fully lost to the bite of his pain-engine. they reposted, parried and locked together in a clash of chainaxe and gladius.
Bane thanked the Empress in moments like this, for only in her supreme wisdom could she have foreseen the devolution of combat. Their geneseed had been molded after the ancient myrmidons of Old Terra, when the cries of death and glory rang proudly across Roman amphitheaters. They bent, and could most certainly be broken, but never yielded. Again, Bane praised the architect of his physiology as the enemy’s gladius pierced the endodermis of his black carapace, sliding past ribs and rupturing a tertiary lung. The betrayed one swallowed his pain and synthesized it into rage. He pushed forward, allowing the fat blade to slide even deeper into his abdominal cavity to close the short distance. The chainaxe screamed to life with the whining of adamantine teeth before biting deeply into the opposing warrior’s throat. It merrily drank his frothing lifeblood, consuming arteries, tendons and finally a rigid spinal column.
“Mother!” The extent of Bane’s anger could only carry his physical body so far. Something popped within him, some organ or another, the glitching runes of an internal visual interface too fragmented to diagnose. He pulled the chipped short sword from his ribs while slashing at the open air. The challenge was soon answered.
Angra waded past her treacherous sons at a deliberate stride. The ugly beauty of her was enough to shred the heart strings; brass artificer armor in the likeness of a baroque gladiator-queen, wristwraps of adamantium chain and a gorget of her own legionaries shattered helmets. The size of a contemptor dreadnought and nearly as wide, the blood-mad Primarch is easily towered above the loyalist by a meter. The muscles that bound her limbs together were thicker than Bane was tall. Her expression was one of calm serenity, though a string of pinkish slime dangled from her slackened jaw.
"A...AN-GRA!" Bane could not have formed a coherent sentence if he had wanted to, the words slurring into a garbled cry. The primarch did not seem bothered. With a slow gesture, her warriors drew back, parting around her as though her very presence burned them. She was their goddess, their lupine champion, their mother. The chsinaxe was the first thing to go, a single slap from the flat of an enormous gorechild reducing the World Eater and the weapon both to a shattered ruin.
“Bane,” the Primarch muttered with unexpected coherency. The fact that she could still remember his name a cerebral shock in itself, “Get…up.”
That was impossible now. Bane rocked into himself, grasping at the air, at Angra, for a weapon, anything. The sands of Istvan swirled in swimming distortion. As if it were a cosmic comedy, the butcher’s nails and the shearing agony they induced were now the loose staples of a sundered psyche. Bane’s words were garbled in a thick coat of bile, “How could you betray us? Your sons. You wear their skulls as trophies. We…We gave everything…You are our Primarh, our—“
“I am a slave!”
All manner of jeering and revelry came to an abrupt halt at the beastly roar of the Primarch’s anguish. The gladiator-queen’s brow twitched as a stream of pink drool dribbled down her chin, "Even now, you beg me for affirmation," She leaned over him, a smile forming on her lips. The expression did not suit her, nor did her sudden composure. Bane tried to crawl away, a futile effort as he found the heel of a giant boot firmly placed atop his chest. Angra pushed down, slowly applying more and more pressure. "You are weak, all of you. I tore at my bondage as the Nucerian High Riders cut open my skull and sliced away my humanity.” Angra’s spite was palpable, running from the corners of her mouth in bubbling ichor, “‘You’ wagged your tail so eagerly at the prospect, willingly subjecting yourself to a fate worse than death on the whim of a misguided delusion. I am NOT your mother! I had brothers and sisters that I was prepared to die beside in the name of true freedom. Now I am a slave to a new mistress.” Angry pressed down until something new snapped within her pleading gene-child, “I never asked for sons…pale mimicries of my image wrought from a distant mother’s experimentations. You are a reminder of my failure. You are a stain…All of you.”
Angra’s words bit deeper than any blade or bolt, suffocating Bane’s righteous fury in a blanket of child-like hurt. He thought to sob. Not from pain or fury or madness. It was hate. Hate beyond reason. Beyond logic. A hate so pure that the tendrils of the empyrean reached out from their unseen realm to sample its delicacy. The Brass God, He Who Languishing on the Throne of Skulls, had not yet whispered to Kharn or even the Primarch herself for that matter, but could hear Bane’s secret prayer. A curse unimaginable for any astartes to deliver upon their gene-mother.
The crumpled warrior’s chest rose against the pressure of a demigod’s heel as to release a bellowing, ursine cry, “I…HATE…YOU!” There it was, finally, what Angra had longed to hear from her whooped hounds since their reunification. She pulled her foot away from the dying space marine’s broken torso before kneeling down to cradle his diminutive form upright.
She whispered the words into his ear, her breath an overwhelming copper, "I know."
***
Void gave way to the flickering fluorescence of artificial light. Salty droplets cooled the broken man’s brow, the only sensation outside of pain he had come to recognize; Bane lived by the margin of a silken thread. A fresh tapestry of surgical scars lined the entirety of dusky flesh; a palate of copper streaked with bands of artificial tissue. How long had he been under?
Where was he? 4 walls of rockcrete, slathered in dried blood and the impacts of inhuman blows were an ominous sign if he’d ever seen one. The fact that he lovers at all meant that he was in the clutches of some traitorous contingent. Death would have been a reprieve, a final capstone to a life of butchery and slaughter in the name of the Empress, but this?
The portal doors slid open with a great, grinding shudder, pneumatic exhaling their pressurized coolant in a cobra’s hiss. The pain-engine in his brain pulsed with renewed hate at the sight of the Red Angel. Stripped of her brass panoply, there was an undeniable womanhood to the Primarch. For all her suffering in the gladiator pits of her youth and the following decades of warfare at the helm of the World Eaters, Angra had been molded in the likeness of her mother’s impossible strength and limitless endurance.
“You have butchered your way across the galaxy without a mote of repentance, yet I still live.” His limbs were useless things in their current state, but had Bane the will he’d have reached out to strangle her.
Angra crossed the room with a measured step, standing over her son as the doors sealed behind her, the hydraulic lock hissing. “You did not grovel.” She spoke with a calmness that felt wholly unnatural, “You, the only one that has sampled my own agony…I should’ve died on Nuceria with my kin, as you should’ve on Istvan…Do you see?”
She did not wait for a response, kneeling to take Bane into her contoured arms. Her scent, a thick musk of oil and gunsmoke and dried blood, washed over the loyalist. The thudding madness ceased its pounding for the first time in Bane’s recollection, giving way to an influx of emotion never before experienced by the legionary. His puberty had been an artificial one, ushered in by the slicing of an apothecary’s blade and dozens of organ implantation ceremonies. Eros was not something that he had come to expect as a member of the XIIth, not when every waking moment was dedicated to war, death and the endless pursuit of the next battlefield. Yet, here he was, gazing into the eyes of a genemother that had cast him aside so casually and feeling a longing that transcended a simple biological imperative. Angra’s squinted eyes — typically bloodshot — were placid pools of tranquility. Bane winced at the pleasant sensation of his gene-mother’s calloused digits as they explored each ruined ridge of the space marine’s midsection. Even if they were born from the most perverse circumstances, her ministrations were a welcome change of pace to the bludgeoning of fists and feet.
Bane looked upon her scarred face, finding it a strange amalgam of the feminine and masculine; the broad, strong chin, the square-shaped features, the sharp, unyielding nose. Full lips, cracked and scarred, twitched into an uncharacteristically soft smirk, the skin pulling at her facial augments. There was little wonder as to why Bane could not resist her advance, barely managing a weak moan of resistance as her lips brushed against his own.