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bone_rosary(Riss:)
I have some stories about Orthodox Word Bearers floating around also and started writing a couple; this is the first bit of "The Blue Heresy," which will probably end up being short-story-length.
Still a first draft--parts of it are pretty rough, but parts of it are pretty good. Someday I should make a policy of only posting finished material here, but then I would probably use that as an excuse to post nothing at all.
Only after finishing this did I realize that some of the ideas slot neatly into Anthony Reynolds' Word Bearer material. :)
When I knew him, I hated him. Until he died, I hated him, because I could not understand. What I could not understand I wanted to control, as all things must be controlled among us—leashed, tamed, obedient. He could not be broken. Until the last, there was the smallest scrap of him that remained utterly his own. The fact that it made no sense, that it made not the slightest difference in the wars that we waged and the training that we conducted, does not matter. There was one place within him that no other could touch.
Azul. Of course I speak of him. Azul, the man who spread the blue among us.
Khoralith am I, a common brother among the Host of a Chaplain—which Chaplain I could not say for certain, for it is not given to us to know the names that they use for each other. We call him by his titles, and that is enough for us. We are the hounds that course before his Word, catching the scent of unrighteousness and belling like a cityful of spires as our prey flies up into his sight. We are his. The collar is ours to wear, and our place is to kneel at his feet and to gratefully accept his commands. Among us, there can be learning, but never innovation, never creation. We are beasts who destroy, and we encircle the Chaplain at our core, defending him with the wall of our flesh and blood and faith. His is the hand that may write; his is the voice that may speak.
We receive. We execute. We preserve.
We do not create. Not for us is the long gestation of wisdom, the birth of letters on the page, the patient nursing of theology into mature and independent life. He alone is capable of such things, and this is why we worship him and die gladly for him, like any hive that swarms within its comb.
We are his.
Azul knew this. Those who heard Azul knew it as well. I knew it.
All of us knew it, and yet we forgot it when something appeared that we could reach for, something common and low and senselessly meaningful that was spread among us like a gift and not enshrined like a relic that a common warrior could never hope to touch.
The Chaplain gave us religion. Azul gave us ownership. We did not even know that we craved it enough to cling to it so after he was gone.
I knew Azul after the war on Enteris III, when our second Company took heavy losses and the first nearly as many. There was a restructuring of the squads, and many men were exchanged between the Companies and made to bond with squads that they had rarely seen outside of the higher rituals. So did Azul come to my Company, uprooted and replanted carelessly by our commanders.
Our connections are not meant to mean anything to them. We accept this truth. Individually, we serve to the depths of our souls, and friendship and history can be nothing before the call of faith. It is a sin to say that one cares for friends. We are not meant to have such bonds, but rather to meld seamlessly into our manyness, however we may flow together, to form the fighting squads and Companies who may together carry out the Chaplain's will.
To value a friendship is to cherish something belonging to oneself alone, shared with another man who is not the lord of our faith. It is to own something that cannot belong to one's master and must therefore be discarded like every other thing that stands in the way of true and pure devotion. One owns nothing, for a man among us is a possession that lives only at the Word of another; we wield our saint's weapons and wear his armor and care for our bodies to keep the machine of our flesh in the best condition for his use. We do not own our bodies, and we do not own our souls. The Chaplain, the conduit through which the heavens and hells come and go from among our ranks, is to be the first and the last object of one's attention and longing—all emotion must be poured out before him so that every passion may be given over and, at his desire, turned into a weapon in his hand.
It is not for us to keep the heart-tides secret. It is not for us to exchange such things among our lower kind. One of our number does not deserve such a gift.
But things happen. Accidents happen, and they are not spoken of. We are not given the words to say the shape of the things that crystallize between us, we hounds, we machines of faith and violence.
Accidents happened between myself and others in my squad, and on Enteris III those men died, all together and suddenly, as if a god of cruel justice had clawed them out of the world to punish me for the weakness in my soul that made me treasure a bond that should not have grown between us all.
I knew that I would understand in time. But just then, when the restructuring brought Azul and more than a dozen of his Company-mates into my unit, my spirit was raw with the mourning that I could not be permitted to express. The wounds in my flesh were well-nigh vanished but my hearts continued to bleed silently within me as though, drop by drop, I was drifting toward my death. The post-campaign rituals of hatred were long over, and while I had relished the desecration inflicted by the Chaplain upon relics wrested from our enemy and hungrily bayed the curse-hymns against the Loyalists' impious souls, the hate was not enough to give me healing. I sought for it, starved for it, aching for something that could replace what I had lost when those to whom I had sinfully bound myself were torn from me. So it was that I prayed relentlessly, focusing purely on the catechisms and prayer-cycles of the highest hatred, desperate to drown my pain in hot wrath. At night, I mortified my flesh before the shrine of the Chaplain in my cell, offering the blood to him, offering the pain and the suffering, praying to be made clean.
As we had not spoken of our bond while we had all lived, so I could not speak of it after they had died. We had no words for it anyway, for all such things belonged to the Chaplain and the Primarch and the gods and could not be spoken of between such as we. I could not speak of it even to myself.
He—such arrogance I thought he had, when first I saw him in the Company common places, for he gazed so nakedly about himself, so shamelessly curious and open as he moved among us. A man is meant to take in his surroundings and use them as he uses his own flesh and senses and tools of war. One revels and lingers only when the commanders breathe across the fires of our faith to make them roar on the eve of battle, and only then are we overwhelmed by the intensity of what we know and wish and feel. To gaze in this way, to receive in this way, when one is simply passing among his brothers in an ordinary hallway is blasphemous. Indulgences such as that—and such as my own secret sin—are not to be permitted among our number.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him that first time as he walked unhelmed and dared to see where such as we should merely look. He walked carefully, in silence, and I saw him drinking in the details of those brothers to whom he had been newly given. He read the words inscribed upon their plate, closely studied the talismans and trophies that hung from those who passed him by, listened to the scraps of conversation and prayer that drifted past him. His attention was not that of a warrior of our blood, who attends to everything in order to better exercise his will (which is guided by the Chaplain's) upon all things around him. Such unwholesome attention as this man gave to his surroundings spoke not at all of the trained instincts of killing.
I saw this, and I snarled into my vox-channel to my Captain, with whom I had been speaking. His helmeted head moved a fraction of an inch, enough so that he too could witness Azul's transgression, and he hissed a verse against spiritual perversion. It pleased me to hear him pray so, even as it pleased me to continue to watch the sinner about his work. My hate-focused devotions had emphasized how pain is lessened and made sweeter when it is turned outward as fuel for violence, and I felt such a blessing settle upon me as I glared venomously through the glow of my HUD, delighting myself by letting the pupil-tracking crosshairs drift over choice targets on his body. The agony of my loss and the weight of my own crime were eclipsed by Azul's shamelessness, for he became then a target of my antipathy and thereby a relief to my hidden wounds.
I have some stories about Orthodox Word Bearers floating around also and started writing a couple; this is the first bit of "The Blue Heresy," which will probably end up being short-story-length.
Still a first draft--parts of it are pretty rough, but parts of it are pretty good. Someday I should make a policy of only posting finished material here, but then I would probably use that as an excuse to post nothing at all.
Only after finishing this did I realize that some of the ideas slot neatly into Anthony Reynolds' Word Bearer material. :)
When I knew him, I hated him. Until he died, I hated him, because I could not understand. What I could not understand I wanted to control, as all things must be controlled among us—leashed, tamed, obedient. He could not be broken. Until the last, there was the smallest scrap of him that remained utterly his own. The fact that it made no sense, that it made not the slightest difference in the wars that we waged and the training that we conducted, does not matter. There was one place within him that no other could touch.
Azul. Of course I speak of him. Azul, the man who spread the blue among us.
Khoralith am I, a common brother among the Host of a Chaplain—which Chaplain I could not say for certain, for it is not given to us to know the names that they use for each other. We call him by his titles, and that is enough for us. We are the hounds that course before his Word, catching the scent of unrighteousness and belling like a cityful of spires as our prey flies up into his sight. We are his. The collar is ours to wear, and our place is to kneel at his feet and to gratefully accept his commands. Among us, there can be learning, but never innovation, never creation. We are beasts who destroy, and we encircle the Chaplain at our core, defending him with the wall of our flesh and blood and faith. His is the hand that may write; his is the voice that may speak.
We receive. We execute. We preserve.
We do not create. Not for us is the long gestation of wisdom, the birth of letters on the page, the patient nursing of theology into mature and independent life. He alone is capable of such things, and this is why we worship him and die gladly for him, like any hive that swarms within its comb.
We are his.
Azul knew this. Those who heard Azul knew it as well. I knew it.
All of us knew it, and yet we forgot it when something appeared that we could reach for, something common and low and senselessly meaningful that was spread among us like a gift and not enshrined like a relic that a common warrior could never hope to touch.
The Chaplain gave us religion. Azul gave us ownership. We did not even know that we craved it enough to cling to it so after he was gone.
I knew Azul after the war on Enteris III, when our second Company took heavy losses and the first nearly as many. There was a restructuring of the squads, and many men were exchanged between the Companies and made to bond with squads that they had rarely seen outside of the higher rituals. So did Azul come to my Company, uprooted and replanted carelessly by our commanders.
Our connections are not meant to mean anything to them. We accept this truth. Individually, we serve to the depths of our souls, and friendship and history can be nothing before the call of faith. It is a sin to say that one cares for friends. We are not meant to have such bonds, but rather to meld seamlessly into our manyness, however we may flow together, to form the fighting squads and Companies who may together carry out the Chaplain's will.
To value a friendship is to cherish something belonging to oneself alone, shared with another man who is not the lord of our faith. It is to own something that cannot belong to one's master and must therefore be discarded like every other thing that stands in the way of true and pure devotion. One owns nothing, for a man among us is a possession that lives only at the Word of another; we wield our saint's weapons and wear his armor and care for our bodies to keep the machine of our flesh in the best condition for his use. We do not own our bodies, and we do not own our souls. The Chaplain, the conduit through which the heavens and hells come and go from among our ranks, is to be the first and the last object of one's attention and longing—all emotion must be poured out before him so that every passion may be given over and, at his desire, turned into a weapon in his hand.
It is not for us to keep the heart-tides secret. It is not for us to exchange such things among our lower kind. One of our number does not deserve such a gift.
But things happen. Accidents happen, and they are not spoken of. We are not given the words to say the shape of the things that crystallize between us, we hounds, we machines of faith and violence.
Accidents happened between myself and others in my squad, and on Enteris III those men died, all together and suddenly, as if a god of cruel justice had clawed them out of the world to punish me for the weakness in my soul that made me treasure a bond that should not have grown between us all.
I knew that I would understand in time. But just then, when the restructuring brought Azul and more than a dozen of his Company-mates into my unit, my spirit was raw with the mourning that I could not be permitted to express. The wounds in my flesh were well-nigh vanished but my hearts continued to bleed silently within me as though, drop by drop, I was drifting toward my death. The post-campaign rituals of hatred were long over, and while I had relished the desecration inflicted by the Chaplain upon relics wrested from our enemy and hungrily bayed the curse-hymns against the Loyalists' impious souls, the hate was not enough to give me healing. I sought for it, starved for it, aching for something that could replace what I had lost when those to whom I had sinfully bound myself were torn from me. So it was that I prayed relentlessly, focusing purely on the catechisms and prayer-cycles of the highest hatred, desperate to drown my pain in hot wrath. At night, I mortified my flesh before the shrine of the Chaplain in my cell, offering the blood to him, offering the pain and the suffering, praying to be made clean.
As we had not spoken of our bond while we had all lived, so I could not speak of it after they had died. We had no words for it anyway, for all such things belonged to the Chaplain and the Primarch and the gods and could not be spoken of between such as we. I could not speak of it even to myself.
He—such arrogance I thought he had, when first I saw him in the Company common places, for he gazed so nakedly about himself, so shamelessly curious and open as he moved among us. A man is meant to take in his surroundings and use them as he uses his own flesh and senses and tools of war. One revels and lingers only when the commanders breathe across the fires of our faith to make them roar on the eve of battle, and only then are we overwhelmed by the intensity of what we know and wish and feel. To gaze in this way, to receive in this way, when one is simply passing among his brothers in an ordinary hallway is blasphemous. Indulgences such as that—and such as my own secret sin—are not to be permitted among our number.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him that first time as he walked unhelmed and dared to see where such as we should merely look. He walked carefully, in silence, and I saw him drinking in the details of those brothers to whom he had been newly given. He read the words inscribed upon their plate, closely studied the talismans and trophies that hung from those who passed him by, listened to the scraps of conversation and prayer that drifted past him. His attention was not that of a warrior of our blood, who attends to everything in order to better exercise his will (which is guided by the Chaplain's) upon all things around him. Such unwholesome attention as this man gave to his surroundings spoke not at all of the trained instincts of killing.
I saw this, and I snarled into my vox-channel to my Captain, with whom I had been speaking. His helmeted head moved a fraction of an inch, enough so that he too could witness Azul's transgression, and he hissed a verse against spiritual perversion. It pleased me to hear him pray so, even as it pleased me to continue to watch the sinner about his work. My hate-focused devotions had emphasized how pain is lessened and made sweeter when it is turned outward as fuel for violence, and I felt such a blessing settle upon me as I glared venomously through the glow of my HUD, delighting myself by letting the pupil-tracking crosshairs drift over choice targets on his body. The agony of my loss and the weight of my own crime were eclipsed by Azul's shamelessness, for he became then a target of my antipathy and thereby a relief to my hidden wounds.
