User blog:Brady26/The Faithless

The Faithless

This story was not written by me but permission was given to post it by the author, credit to Ratskeller 

The chains, heavy around his limbs, chafed through his thick robes as he was dragged through the palace. Or at least, what passed for a Governor's palace on icy Xontal. The heavy steel doors, decorated with rudimentary carvings of the Emperor and his Primarchs, signalled to Sayl that they had reached the office of the Governor himself.

'Well Heretic, we meet at last.' The Governor guffawed, pleased at his own melodrama. The heavy wooden desk, a luxury imported from the capital planet, dominated the room. Thick glass windows let in the grey-white light of reflected ice and overcast skies. The chains that bound him scraped along the engraved floor, a low screech that disrupted the Governor's rehearsed monologue, making him frown. The Governor motioned to one of the guards, and a heavy blow landed on Sayl's right side, sending him crashing to the ground. Right side, not left. The guard knew what lurked on the left side of Sayl's twisted body. It coiled beneath his robes, wrapped around his torso, waiting.

All of those blessed by the Great Devourer are shaped by their blessing, but not all are shaped equally. Sayl's first memory was of hunger. He dragged his young body, growing and strengthening much faster than a normal human, around the small ice mining camp. The bodies of his parents and the other miners lay in the snow, mutilated and devoured. Still he limped on, dragged by his left side through the snow. His feet were cold and his stomach ached with old hunger and fresh, raw meat.

Symbiosis is almost never a partnership of equals. It uncoiled from his chest, as he guided it to. The heavy, ornate robes hid its grotesque form. Ornamentation, like all ostentatious displays of power, were not for the benefit of the Things in the Ice, nor Sayl's quest to feed the worlds of Grahl to their unending maws. The trappings of a preacher, of an apostate, were for the lesser minds of men. Men who saw his tall, lean form, his cold eyes and strange robes, and feared. All men listen when they are afraid, and in their trembling masses, they had heard his gospel.

He stood up now, making the Governor start with surprise. The guards at his side fell back, then prostrated themselves behind him, as the wet thud of something heavy hit the floor. With a snap of his shoulders, he shrugged off his heavy chains. More symbolism, more delays, it grew impatient. He strode forward in time with its slithering, its blue-pink form moving quickly across the Governor's room. Its head was crested with white chitin plates, and a grinning maw slavered beneath them. Its salivating jaws and yellow eyes were the most developed parts of it. Hard, muscled flesh made up the rest of it, stretching back and becoming thinner with each writhing foot of flesh. A thick set of umbilical cords completed their connection, running from its midsection through the void where Sayl's left arm should have been. Coiling around his beating heart and down through his digestive system, feeding him and being fed in turn.

The Governor screamed as it leapt at him, dragging Sayl painfully behind it as it released its hunger in an orgy of bloodshed.

The crowd chanted low and harsh as he walked on to the balcony. The old words of his people, those who dwelt on Xontal since before the first spaceships reunited them with wider humanity. And yet, like all things lost, they are changed before they are found. In their thousands they packed the square, their cries for exaltation bellowing at the grey, cold sky. He stood before them, a living idol, a prophet. The broodmind coiled around the Governor's staff, perching atop it, blood dripping from its maw. It knew nothing of symbolism, or the adulation of the blessed before it. It only knewthe need to devour, and the need to replicate. Sayl marvelled at its perfect simplicity, its clarity of purpose. He gazed down at the ragged crowd before him, and standing in the trappings of men, he spoke of the coming of gods.