A clearing of the throat. A licking of the lips, and a crooked smile.

'I let the Campanile in.'

The legionary was upon the traveller in a single stride. He picked it up by the neck. Blanchot's hope flared that the massive gauntlet would now squeeze, crushing the unlife from the horrid thing. But instead the Space Marine spoke, rage blasting from the helm's augmitter grille.

'What did you say?'

The final dark was coming for Blanchot now, dragging him down into an infinite abyss of teeth and despair. And the screams. The screams returning in the full force of truth: the eternal screams of the crew of the Campanile.

His body kept grinning.

'So pleased to finally speak with you, my lord,' it said to the Legion warrior.

So very pleased.

The death of hope. That is what the XVII Legion tried to achieve, and they came close so very close. The citizens of Calth were innocent bystanders in a war that they had no hope of understanding, and yet they suffered worst of all.

But hope did not die. In the shadowed caverns beneath the ravaged surface, those of us who were left regrouped and continued the fight. We all knew that as long as we held out, the XVII had failed in their primary goal: they did not break the people of Calth. Far from it, in fact.

Hope clung to life in the caverns like a beacon, and a beacon always burns most brightly in the darkest depths of night. That seems an appropriate analogy, given what was yet to come.

I shake the bolt round about the inside of my armoured fist. Like a die, it rattles. Like a die, it awaits an outcome. An outcome unknowable in the enclosed space of my gauntlet, a realisation it can find only in the breech of the pistol that sits brusque and empty upon my belt. I feel its inevitability, hot in my grasp, as though it might burn a hole through my ceramite palm. Heavy with the impending doom it carries, the round is a waiting demonstration of form and function it aches perfection. Like the Ultramarines themselves, it was crafted for one purpose: to take life.

Who am I to deny such imminence? Who am I?

My name for all that it matters is Hylas Pelion. My brothers call me 'Pelion the Lesser', for there have been others of that name who have done more to earn their place in our Legion's history. My achievements are many, but I stand pauldron to pauldron with champions and heroes every day, for Guilliman's sons are blessed with many honours and a victorious tradition. My pistol has consigned many a xenos abomination to death; the edge of my blade is the world's end to all who refuse the Emperor's beneficent offer of unification. For my small part in the Imperium's rebuilding, I have earned the Chapter rank of Honorarius.

My Chapter Master died in defence of noble Calth. Sergeant Arcadas leads those left of the 82nd Company as I forge ahead with my blade, cutting a path through new enemies. Brother Molossus bears the company's tattered standard. There is little room to manoeuvre the mighty banner in the cragged confines of Calth's labyrinthine arcologies, but this matters little to Molossus. The standard is a part of him, the most honourable part, it seems like so many who carry such a burden, he would rather lose the arm that bears the banner than the banner itself.

Fighting from the front, we have taken the arcology known as Tantoraem. Arcology Magnesi had been our shelter from the solar storm the cool darkness of the rocky enclave was a subterranean womb, where the indomitable people of Calth might begin again. The sunblind and the scarred, the scorched and the marked, they refused the let the blessed memory of their home world die.

Calth lived on. This tiny corner of Ultramar endured.

Over time, columned caverns became centres of basic industry and food production. Winding catacombs became thoroughfares, lined with improvised habs and grottos. Archways became sentry posts and vaulted caves housed the reverential masses, who gathered to give thanks to the Legiones Astartes Guilliman's sons, the Ultramarines who had stayed behind. It mattered not that we too had been left behind on ailing Calth. Our presence alone seemed to give the survivors hope and purpose. They shared our determination to fight for what was left of their world.

Our number fought on, as we were bred to do. The battle for Calth descended into an underground war. The enemy was the same: our Word Bearer cousins, carrying with them a hatred unsought and the shame of our fraternal failure. They had become dark beacons to weak-minded multitudes, and held congress with daemons. A new camaraderie to replace the old, perhaps? The stakes were the same and had never been higher. We fought for the bodies and souls of our small empire. We were the shield upon which the enemy smashed itself, desperate for innocent blood.

In defence of that blood, we took our fight into the depths to the arcologies and the darkness beyond. We crafted the saviour stone of our havens into watchposts, tactical redoubts and the Arcropolis the Ultramarines fort that dominated the dome-primaris of the Magnesi system.

Our conquering instinct an irrepressible genetic trait took us through the rubble, smoke and ruin. As ever, my sword led the way, since ammunition for our ranged weapons was by now precious and scarce. It took me and my brothers into the Thurcyon and Edanthe arcologies. The battles were bloody and the tunnels confined, with sword and combat shield the order of both day and night. Like a blue torrent through the foe-choked branches and systems, we battered and stabbed our way to untidy victories.

Thurcyon held for us Dusa Dactyl, the Kreedstress of the Edictae-Ghuul. Her cultist maniacs worshipped their Word Bearer overlords for them it was a dubious yet all-encompassing honour, securing them a martyr's place in some after-hell of their own devising.

Edanthe was a nightmare. A nest of otherworldly beasts, summoned to do our former kinsmen's bidding. What they lacked in the cultists' suicidal fanaticism, they more than made up for with murderous savagery. Things of every shape and size, monsters of fang and flame and horn and scale. Creatures crafted of whim. Some were death-dealing creations of infernal perfection while others were unshapely fantasies of a disturbed mind. A madness in flesh, forced upon my eyes. I made scabbards of the wretched beasts, my sword slipping in and out of their nightmare forms. They died hard, sapping our precious strength, before screeching back to inexistence.

Cutting through the mobs and monstrosities, we finally faced our dark brothers once more. Their plate was a parody in ceramite; seductive sigils of forbidden lore snaked their way across the legionary red. Spikes, shanks and skewers erupted from their armour, cutting serrated silhouettes in the darkness. Worst of all was the pinpoint loathing in their eyes their faces were masks of grinning derangement, where murderous fantasies were willed into reality.

We ended all but one, the same soul escaping our wrath in both systems.

A bearer of the word. A trader in lies. A living untruth known as Ungol Shax.

I had faced Ungol Shax on the slaughterfields of Komesh but his throat eluded the edge of my blade. I would have silenced the bastard altogether, if it hadn't have been for the frothing sea of blood and madness rising and falling before my weapons. Cultists. I spit the word.

One after another, in a continuous train of insanity, the Chaplain's knife-disciples threw themselves before him. Each met the blessed release of my blade or the demolishing crash of my pistol. Each death kept me seconds from my enemy's end. When the poison-star Veridian razed the very memory of Calth from the surface of the dying world, Ungol Shax and his foetid minions followed us into the deeps. His raving multitudes swarmed the Thurcyon and Edanthe arcologies. They bred and sacrificed in equal measure, bringing forth monsters from the shadows. It took us the better part of a year to clear the systems and bring silence to the darkness once more.

The tetrarch had warned against further expansion. He had fought alongside the legendary Ventanus on the surface and was the best of our blades, but also had a gift for arithmata and reckoning. He had the measure of a man with but a glance, and knew his worth with blade, boltgun or fusil mere moments into his company. Besides the primarch himself, he was the best tactical mind for several sectors perhaps the whole of Ultramar and despite having little to work with beneath the surface of Calth, had created an unfaltering enclave of order, sanity and survival amidst the chaos of war and want.

He was not above compassion either. Those that had fled the fallen arcologies, that had run the gauntlet of daemon-haunted caves and had held out in small groups until they could hold out no more they were welcomed through the collapsed arches of Arcology Magnesi. Not just the fighting men and women, and those that might be trained as such, but the bedraggled trickle of innocents too. The young, the aged, the infirm and the injured: all were welcome to our dwindling supplies.

We could only hold so much ground, however. The tetrarch's strategic calculations said so. It was better to hold three arcology systems firmly in our grip, denied to the enemy, than fail to hold five or more and allow Word Bearers and their creed-slaves to pour in, flooding the system once more with death and destruction. Whereas rock and vigilance were enough to keep cultists and brother-betrayers from the territory that we'd carved, the daemon-things were something else. Frequent patrols through our own arcologies became necessary. Screams of the awoken would report eaten limbs and the scamper of tiny monstros-ities into the shadows. Outbreaks of violence and cluster-killings amongst the survivors were ascribed to the whisperings of dark entities. Strange contagions swept through the crowded arcologies but were eventually traced back to water supplies contaminated by daemon feculence.

These obscenities were thought to originate from Tantoraem, a nearby arcology system overrun with Word Bearers and their filthy allies. During our early fortification of Arcology Magnesi, the tetrarch had ordered the connecting mag-lev tunnels collapsed, sealing off the hab-branch of caves and caverns. What had been formerly thought of as tactically unadvisable became a strategic necessity: Tantoraem had to be cleansed for Magnesi to be safe, in the same way that the Fiend of Abydox and its greenskin empire could not be tolerated on Ultramar's borders, when the empire was still young.

The order was given. With Sergeant Arcadas and Brother Molossus at my side, and the standard of the 82nd Company held high above the helms of the thirty battle-brothers making up the expedition force, I led the invasion of Arcology Tantoraem.

Our blades cut through the swarming cultists. Our battered plate took all of the hatred they had to offer. Behind, the fighting men and women of the amalgamated Magnesi garrison former Imperial Army soldiers and members of various decimated defence force contingents lit up the darkness with power-conserving streams of las-fire from their fusils.

Once again, I feel the presence of Ungol Shax. There was something about the arcology's rancid defences, something familiar, like an echo of the nightmare that had been Edanthe and Thurcyon. Ultramarines were lost and many among the amalgamates perished. Victory had its price as it always does but eventually Arcology Tantoraem was ours. The cavern-complex now lies carpeted with slaughtered cultists, ritually-summoned spawn and the cardinal colours of armoured cadavers the Word Bearers who brought the righteous fury of Guilliman's Legion down upon themselves.

At the very rear of the Tantoraem system, in the far reaches of the hell-hole's pillared caverns, I discover that Ungol Shax has once again eluded me. Instead I find the remaining few who would stand in the way of victory absolute.

I shake the bolt round about the inside of my armoured fist. Like a die, it rattles. Like a die, it awaits an outcome. An outcome unknowable in the enclosed space of my gauntlet.

I look up. Standing in the shallows of a groundwater lake is a battle-brother in red. His plate is splattered with the blood of innocents, but you wouldn't know. The gore has soaked into the paint, in the same way that some wayward darkness has saturated his soul. He clutches a boltgun it clunks its emptiness about the chamber with every twitch of the recreant's ceramite finger. The hollow sound of defeat.

He stares into the shallows, his sallow face defiant and fearless. There is shame there; not for what he has done, but rather shame for what he has failed to do. A bitter vexation that plays out upon his cracked and mumbling lips. He is surrounded. Five believers who, their weapons being spent also, have taken to clutching and touching the armoured Word Bearer, like an honoured statue or protective totem. They whisper murderous encouragement and traitor-faith to their lord. They think their demigods and monsters will save them still.

One among them is the cultist leader Seid Phegl, Cognosci of the Red Munion. I've encountered him before, in the dark and the deep he came to Calth at the head of ten thousand fools, bought with lies and the simple tricks of beings from the beyond.

The Word Bearer turns to look into the lake depths. He watches the dark water lap against the craggy walls, then turns back to the rest of the Ultramarines lining the shore.

There will be no escape for him. He knows it, and the boltgun tumbles into the water. The reaction from the cultists is instantaneous, like a sudden affliction. They hiss and writhe about his impassive, armoured form. There are tears. There is fear.

'A word with you, cousin,' I call out across the water.

The Word Bearer bridles. His acolytes haul at his ceramite limbs, but to no avail. He takes one last lingering look into the lake. My free hand unconsciously comes to rest upon the pommel of my sword. If my enemy attempts an escape, then I want to be ready.

He doesn't, though. Shrugging off his followers like a second skin, he strides through the shallows towards me. I hear the creak of my brothers' plate. Brother Phornax formerly of the Librarius, and therefore invaluable in his knowledge of the Word Bearers immaterial allies draws up beside me. Molossus has his hand upon the hilt of his chainsword. Sergeant Arcadas's all-but-empty boltgun comes level with his helmet optics.

'Pelion...'

'I have this, sergeant,' I tell him.

My enemy's eyes are furtive and furious, but they are finally fixed upon my own. Arcadas won't back down, though. 'That's far enough,' he tells the Word Bearer.

The legionary slows but keeps coming. His face screws up with spite, barely suppressed.

'It is you who have gone as far as you're going to go, Ultramarine.'

Arcadas steps forward, the muzzle of his bolter aiming at the Word Bearer's face. I extend two digits of my gauntlet and gently push the boltgun down towards the ground.

'Our brother seems to have something to say,' I announce, meeting the Word Bearer's wretched gaze once more. 'Let's hear him out.'

'I have but one thing to say to you, son of Ultramar,' the forsaken Space Marine spits back.

He was fast. He was very fast. A knife some kind of kris or sacrificial blade, like so many of them carried now. It was there, suddenly between us. Perhaps it had been mag-locked to the rear of his belt, or perhaps it had been passed to him by one of his tactual followers. It was there, regardless, blood-stained and sharpened on the thousand souls it had taken in the service of some infernal pact.

It would have claimed my soul, of that I have no doubt but fast as he was, I was faster.

The Word Bearer's face had no sooner formed the ugly mask of murderous intention, than my sword cleared its scabbard. The blade, light in my grip, sweeps down, taking the Word Bearer's hand off at the wrist. In shock, the renegade instinctively reaches for the gushing stump with his other hand. Before both gauntlet and knife clatter to the stone floor, my short blade streaks around and slices the other off as well.

Moments pass. My blade is still but ready and sings with the ruthless execution of the manoeuvre. The Word Bearer stumbles back into the shallows, staring down at his armoured stumps. Blood squirts into the groundwater lake.

His acolytes need no order. They throw themselves at me.

Seid Phegl, Cognosci of the Red Munion, is suddenly torn back, lost in the bloody crash of a single bolt round from Sergeant Arcadas's gun.

'Hold!' I order, such human detritus being not worthy of our precious ammunition. 'Blades only.'

The cultists come at me, and they die. Thrusts and sweeps, as fluid and economical as they are brutal, tear through their squalid forms. The Word Bearer splashes down onto his knees and looks up at me. Bodies, and parts thereof, fall about him.

'As far as we're going to go...' I say. 'Well, we're still going, cousin, despite the sick attempt by your wayward Legion to destroy us. It's more than I can say for you. Now you'll hear me out where is your master, Ungol Shax?'

He sneers. 'You really think my last words in this universe will be the answers to your questions, Ultramarine?'

'They will be if you desire a clean death. A death befitting a Space Marine, and not some carcass of corrupted meat that lost its way to false enlightenment.'

'Go suckle at your father's teat, boy,' the Word Bearer seethes. 'You are but a babe in the great affairs of the galaxy and your sire the wet nurse of calamity.'

'Where is Ungol Shax, Word Bearer?' I repeat, struggling to hold my temper.

The renegade goes on. 'Those that fear the great truths of our times are not long for this universe.'

'Longer than you, cousin,' I tell him. I nod to Molossus, who has unclipped his chainsword and guns the weapon to a throaty roar.

'Belay that,' a commanding voice booms from behind us.

I turn. Through the gloom strides the tetrarch himself. Tauro Nicodemus Prince of Saramanth, Tetrarch of Ultramar, Champion of Roboute Guilliman himself now, lowly master of Arcology Magnesi. However, this does not prevent Nicodemus from presenting himself with a more regal bearing. His plate is polished to perfection. His weapons gleam care and lethal proficiency. The plume of his helm, clutched under one armoured arm matches his pteruges and scarlet mantle. The cloak follows him like a river of blood, through the damp darkness of the caves, flapping aside to reveal the bejewelled Crux Aureas the mark of a champion.

To the unknowing eye, such ceremony might appear as an exercise in vanity. Serfs and seneschals should have more important duties to attend to in times of war than lacquering the filigree of their tetrarch's pauldrons. As in all things, Nicodemus has prioritised strategy over self-importance. Like the arcology itself, men's souls required fortification. The people of Calth decimated and returned to the mean existence of survival underground need a symbol of pride and defiance. There are no better symbols of Ultramar's superiority and grandeur in the face of catastrophe than the Legiones Astartes themselves. Nicodemus needs them to feel that dignity and worth, to know that they are so much, despite having so little. There is still a war to be fought, and the tetrarch cannot allow the emptiness of men's hearts to fill with defeat, for then the war would be lost before it had even begun.

Nicodemus has been blessed with the primarch's eyes, and I find the familiar, reproving gaze of Guilliman upon me.

'The Seventeenth Legion are our cousins no more,' the tetrarch says, marching up and flanked by two honour guards. He passes his helmet on and holds out his gleaming gauntlets. The first Ultramarine places a master-crafted bolt pistol in his hand; the other a magazine of precious ammunition. 'They are the heralds of their own oblivion. Their words hold no interest for us. The only deed to warrant our attention is their death, and we shall be the instrument thereof.'

Tauro Nicodemus steps up to the kneeling Word Bearer. The renegade goes to speak but the tetrarch puts a single bolt through his skull before the words escape his cracked lips. The shot echoes about the cave.

'Am I understood?' he asks.

'Yes, tetrarch,' the Ultramarines answer in unison.

Nicodemus nods. 'Sergeant Arcadas.'

'Yes, my lord.'

'The 82nd Company's work here is done,' he says. 'Have your men gather what ammunition remains rounds, flasks and power packs. Collect it bolt by bolt, if you have to. Anything we can send back at these armoured mongrels upon their return. Leave everything else to rot.'

'Yes, sir.'

Arcadas, Molossus and the Ultramarines go to disperse.

'Tetrarch,' I say.

'Speak,' Nicodemus replies, the word knowing and heavy. Molossus hovers with his tattered banner, while the sergeant searches the corpse-plate of a nearby Word Bearer, watching the storm between his masters quietly unfold.

'Would it not further the Legion's interest to hold this arcology?' I ask. 'If we abandon it, won't the enemy return over time to threaten our security once more?'

'I forgive you your conquering spirit, brother,' Nicodemus says, 'for it burns as bright as any in Ultramar. The time for empire building will come, trust me, but we are not building empires here. This is attrition. This is survival. We look to more than just the Legion's interests. The people come first. We were bred in service of humanity, not to simply gratify our own warrior desires.'

'Ungol Shax was here,' I counter. 'He will be a threat to the people and their survival until we end him.'

'So you would clear out arcology after arcology in your search for this one enemy, building a guttering empire in the darkness as you go,' the tetrarch says. 'What of the other diseased minds that will prey upon our vulnerability in the meantime? We don't presently have the numbers to hold that much territory.'

'We are Ultramarines...' I venture. Nicodemus narrows his eyes.

'You do not need to tell me that, Pelion. We are Ultramarines and we could do it, but ask yourself whether we should do it. It is a question you ought consider. For example, I do not know what you expected to gain from engaging the enemy in conversation there.'

His tone confuses me. 'I was drawing information from the prisoner, tetrarch.'

'No Hylas. This man had no information to give you. You were pointlessly toying with him, as though you expect to create fear in the hearts of such men with petty threats of violence and the promise of an executioner's mercy. They have turned from the Emperor's wisdom and consigned themselves to damnation. They are already living out their greatest fear. Your only duty is to end such abomination, and end it quickly. You think you were drawing information from him, while he drew you further into his lies and ignorance. The only words that the Seventeenth Legion now bear are poison.'

'Tetrarch'

'Enough,' Nicodemus commands. 'We will not play their games in the shadows. It is what the Word Bearers want for us, and they wait for us there. You will stand to your post, Honorarius Pelion, and not be drawn into such dark'

A sudden splashing from the far reaches of the groundwater lake attracts the attention of every Ultramarine in the chamber. Someone, or something, is surfacing.

Sergeant Arcadas and the tetrarch's honour guard bring up their bolters in a flash, and once more Molossus guns his chainsword into life. Tauro Nicodemus, still with pistol in hand, stares into the dark waters. It is I, however, leading with the short blade of my sword, that first advances into the shallows.

A spiked and armoured shape breaks the surface. It gasps and gurgles in the icy, gritty water, hauling itself up from the depths and over the jagged rocky bed of the lake. The colour of the plate identifies it as an enemy. A Word Bearer.