Goodbye [A short story]

Introduction: A while ago when I wrote my article on soulmates, I said I was “feeling romantic, and it was either this or write the cringiest imaginable fan-fic about a space marine and rogue pskyer”. Anyway, two paid subscribers and one free subscriber asked me to write it, and it is Christmas, and I wanted to do something fun, so here is “The cringiest imaginable fan-fic about a space marine and a rogue psyker” Merry Christmas!

It is summer under the apple tree, and two young siblings relax, worn out by the humidity. The boy is pleased that his big sister is spending the day with him, but would never admit it. His sister is excited because she has “borrowed” some “magic” cards.

“I’ll tell your future!”

The boy doesn’t know what to think. If she tells his future, maybe it will be bad, or maybe he will be bored because he’ll already know everything that will happen before it happens. However, he knows his sister wouldn’t do anything too bad and is Pretty Sensible so he nods, slowly at first, but with growing enthusiasm.

The girl doesn’t know the rules for an emperor’s tarot spread, so she starts drawing and keeps drawing till it seems right to stop. “Hrmm, the pilgrim, Guilliman’s wrath, the squat, the executioner, the shattered world, the young warrior, the galactic lens, the star, the nova, the dishonearred skyon, the silver door, the candle and the galaxy. That’s a lot of big cards.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know, but something big”

“Is it good or bad?”

“I don’t think a whole life can be good or bad”.

The Pilgrim

As the Astrates squad and their escorted inquisitor cross the crest of the hill, they see for the first time the ruined titan. The first sign of the inexplicable is its arrangement. each individual flake is ordinary enough, but together they are arranged

Like a flower unfolding.

A sentimental metaphor, but gazing at the metal, one that occurs to all of them. It is not the random pattern of beams and parts laid out by an explosion they’d anticipated. Instead, the fragmentary corpse of the titan forms geometric whirls, bright in the death world’s desert sun.

Guilliman's Wrath

They begin their approach. The inquisitor holds a psychic dampener, a strange beeping thing with articulated and moving antenna. Ben has attached on his side a set of handcuffs, as do the rest of the marines, to be applied if any living psykers are found. Why they were expecting psykers at the ruins of a titan only the inquisitor knew. The hardpacked ground is broken only by a handful of weeds wilted as if defeated and waiting impatiently to die.

As the squad approaches the epicenter, Ben, their newest and youngest member recalls another time, another encounter with the psychic. He recalls old squad brothers approaching the dead body of a Zoanthrope, feeling like they were being looked upon even still. He was at a slightly greater distance. He saw the flash in its eyes, he saw the light, spread out from the eyes, becoming a whirling black flame. A sphere was made in the ground, nothingness. Then Zoanthrope and squad were gone.

The Squat

Back in the present, the group trudges forward. Ahead there is a body, more of a spray or smear than a discrete object, cut to pieces by countless shards, rising from the ground like a grass of knives.

The inquisitor begins to speak, but Ben finds cannot follow his words. He feels a wave of deep sadness, so strong it carries him away out of time.

The Executioner

Now he is further back and wholly submerged in memory. Before the death of his first squad. The strange wyrdboy melee specialists characteristic of this particular WAAAGH jog-charge toward his squad, briefly taking cover before a prefabricated metal shed serving as a hovel. He hoists his missile launcher but hesitates remembering the civilians huddled within. Suddenly, in his mind, the dozens of noncombatants inside it all bear the faces of his mother and his father and his big sister. His finger is paralyzed for what must have been long seconds, and then the shouting of his squad captain works, bypassing his conscious mind yet activating his trigger finger. Everyone except the squad dies, and his conscience has availed no one, later he is disciplined before the whole company by verbal humiliation

This memory is before him now, like a highway that only loops back to itself again and again. Distantly, he wonders where the inquisitor and his current squad have gone. He feels he will live here in this memory permanently now, smeared out and replaying these moments over and over again till his mind is a corpse rictus of pain, seeking forever to complete an evaluation of his deeds that can never be completed by thought alone. When, in blankness, he heard like distant thunder the yell of Sargent, and his finger moved in response without intervening thought, was that him? Did he kill them, or was it reflex? The question and the memory repeat in a thudding rhythm.

In the timeless space, a hand of light reaches out, touching his brow granting his mind freedom of movement again. He sees now a lattice of imperfectly binding necessities, all the forces that had led to the horror. Uncertainty with knowledge, and contingency with necessity woven together. He sees the questions, floating like orbs in a vacuum and realizes with relief that he can allow them. He lets the pain fall to earth, grasps the hand of light by instinct, and raises himself. up. Is he inside memory, or another place entirely?

The Shattered World

Now, it appears, he is back in the world.

Or at least the terrain has not changed, but the inquisitor and his squad are gone. Somehow, intuitively, he feels that it is he, not they who have been removed, for although everything looks the same, somehow it looks new. The plants, not changed in any superficial way, now seem to him like they will eventually win their war against the blankness. The sky is now no longer ominous but thoughtful. Emperor’s throne how can a sky look thoughtful?

Near the horizon, he sees a rock he recalls from before. Although its superficial appearance has not changed, now echoes the face of his first and only lover. An affair of only a few months, just before his ascension to the Astartes. The red, rusty coloring reminded him of Adrian’s red hair under the oddly intimate light of Sarac’s red moon as they sat underneath the apple trees at the very edge of town, right before the protective fence.

Ah, the fence- 20ft high and deadly to touch- in front of it a smaller, unelectrified fence to stop children and idiots from being zapped. Something moves underground and at once, the fence tilts.

The Young Warrior

When recruited he’d not long been an adult and yet, by the standards of nearly all chapters, he’d joined unthinkably late.

All this felt unfair. The whole world felt unfair. The sensation of unfairness was strange, not merely because he was applying it to the chapter that had honored him so, but because he was feeling it at all. It occurred to him that he had almost never, in the years after his ascension, entertained the thought that anything was unfair- not in his own life, or the lives of others. The sensation of injustice was largely alien to the space marine mind. There was good and bad, yes, but that wasn’t the same thing. Why was he feeling like this? Was he under psychic attack?

The only cloud in the sky was now also the face of the Chaplain who had found him. Unlike most other marines it wasn’t the chapter’s fault directly that he’d never see his family again. A catastrophic fence breakage at his township on the Death World chapter planet he’d grown up on had let in predators, who exploited the opportunity with military precision. In half an hour everyone- his lover, his mother and father, his sister, countless friends- all dead. If the local fauna hadn’t acted with organized malice they’d managed a good semblage.

The Astartes had found him fending off a canine-like monstrosity with Adrian’s femur bone- a monstrosity that took multiple bursts of bolter fire to bring down.

Subsequently, despite being two years over the cutoff for recruits, they’d implanted gene-seed “It must be a sign” said the Chaplain, more given to mysticism than most, and the chapter master hadn’t been inclined to argue. His extraordinary entrance to the chapter had been matched only by his unexceptional subsequent career- various minor commendations and one relatively minor disciplinary infraction (the aforementioned delay in pulling the trigger).

It wasn’t their fault directly. Best not to be unfair with one’s accusations of unfairness. And yet, those he’d loved would have been safe if the chapter hadn’t deliberately kept the world dangerous for the purpose of breeding recruits. That was wrong. It didn’t need to be like that. Others did it differently. Many chapters didn’t need death worlds to make recruits. Neither should his chapter, ergo his chapter had acted wrongly.

Galactic Lens

That thought, he realized belatedly, should have been unthinkable- it was an accusation against his own chapter, and countless barriers within him should have prevented it. The space marine’s power armor is nothing compared to their internal bulwarks.

“Accusation” was not quite correct. He felt it without rancor, the sense of injustice replaced now with a deep sadness that things were as they were. The sadness, he reflected distantly felt clean compared against adrenaline, anger and desperation.

The Star

A voice rang out in mental words.

Sadness, of a certain sort, is just as much the opposite of despair as hope is, but the nature of a sadness is hard to know.

Someone was in his head. On instinct, he challenged: “Who are you?!”

I will call myself… Sandreal. I set myself to another place to think for a while- a place near the mundane world, but fixed to my resonance. That you are here suggests that you share that resonance.

“WHY ARE YOU IN MY HEAD?”

On the contrary, you are in your head. There was a yearning in you to reflect, and so I relaxed the barriers. And when you were trapped and screaming, what could I have done but free you?

Then, revelation. Sandreal fades in like a star at evening. He glows, and the light frames his features, like the haloed men and women in the company’s chapel; sadfaced angels. The entity comes to the same height as Benjamin by floating a few feet above the ground. He is slender, his face far too delicate for the grief in those eyes, so attentive yet so careworn. He was perhaps in his mid-twenties, but beyond and above all that ageless, straw hair backlit by the light, naked but for a simple white garment of shifting design which changed perpetually, now a tunic, now a toga, now jeans and a shirt. He looked just a little like…

The Nova

Benjamin has his orders. Almost too fast to watch, he moves to cuff the figure, who stands there impassively, letting the metal close around his hands.

“What are you?”

I am the remainder of the equation, and what remains of lost lives.

Seven rocks rise from the ground, and from the sky falls a drop of inky darkness. The rocks become seven worlds. They begin to circle the blackness, each equidistant, the darkness working to hold each away from each. The terrible potency of that circling flows through the circuit but something is wrong or rather there is an opportunity- a miscalculated wobble in an orbit. The rocks collide with each other, and flare like the sun, consuming the darkness.

Ben shakes his head, dashing the vision away. “Be you Daemon or Witch?”

Human, so a witch I suppose. There were seven psykers, powering that titan, and one, uh, null to control us. I am the consummation of the form of the seven psykers, I am the joining in balance of the pattern powers that be vainly imagined they’d denied. As I formed, we were destroyed, and the Titan and its null captain scattered across the face of the earth.

“Elaborate!” Benjamin feels himself slipping into the role of interrogator. Not the first time that he had… No, it wasn’t safe to think about that here. Meanwhile, the psyker seems not scared, but sad, perhaps even disappointed.

What came next is not spoken, it flies into Ben’s mind like an intricate figure revealed all at once.

The ruins of the Titan before you was a Psi-Titan, an experimental unit, based on old and most secret designs. The operation of the circuit powering Psi-Titan needs disharmony- carefully established to madden and bleed the psyker components who are used as fuel/forges/fires. In the absence of such disharmony between the psyker components/characters/humours, it is possible for pain to be overcome. A resonation commences, seemingly with little upper limit, until at last the titan is shattered and a new gestalt forms. One of my parents/predecessors/parts was thought to be on the edge of chaos and was to serve as a separator for the circuit- or so was the intention of the inquisitors. In truth, she was pure as starlight/snow/springwater and could not serve that function within the psychic machinery. The failure of the psychometric calculations and selections triggered the collapse of the titan and killed the previous I’s. I was created from their essence, resolving like a harmony out of notes.

“You are the joining of the components?”

I only have fragments of each, a seventh of their being I suppose. Scarce little treasures/times/tithes, like the inherited artifacts of a mother dead in childbirth. Enough though, that I am not not each, and am yet new. My birth is the annihilation of my parents and each deserved better.

The Dishonoured Scion

“Not human then. A jigsaw being. Worse than an alien in its superficial resemblance to the human.” As Benjamin spoke he tried to raise within himself the armour of contempt.

The figure smiles at him sadly and raises his hands. The handcuffs melt off, before hitting the ground and reforming, once again solid.

In a way, but is that not just like you? Do you not see yourself? Your hypno-indoctrination, the remnants of the Primarch within you, all joined into your original being. You are no longer Ben, yet you are not not Ben, we are alike in our discontinuities, we are both constellations of fragments.

Something happens to the Astartes then- a figure-ground inversion. Rather than seeing in the world about him projections from his mind, he realized what he saw was his mind.

Now both can see Ben’s mind from outside itself, the gray structural supports of hypno-indoctrination, the foundations in his human life, each battle stacked like a brick, the mysterious cement of the gene seed, and the others who had come into his being, coming to him like roads. Some roads are old, almost overgrown- others clean, some lined with flowers. His mother, his squadmates all roads lead to and from him- even now after their loss. Except they…

Except every event is a world, and he a is multiverse intersecting them, in a higher dimensional space he can very nearly see, but it all blurs into incomprehensibility when he tries to imagine all those other universes, all the souls of those he had loved and hated projecting in. Now he beheld the successive selves he was built upon- the great division when he became a space marine only one of several. He knew now that the galaxy did not simply kill everyone, it killed everyone many times,

The Silver Door

But yet, in that there is the hope that many more have lived than were known.

You can hear my thoughts, can’t you?

You think of them so loudly, and in this shared… place of ours. Besides, how can you take offense? You can hear my thoughts too.

Because you’re projecting them into my head you… you… fucking witch!

No, I’m not, or rather I am, only in exactly the same sense that you’re projecting your thoughts into my head.

Ben seeks an answer, but none comes. The composite being steps forward and simultaneously the Astartes raises his bolter.

You are not really afraid of me. You do not intend to shoot me and are acting only out of habit. I do not intend to harm you, and almost none of the many ways I could end your existence require me to step closer to you.

Once again the phrase is somehow conveyed all simultaneously. Or perhaps it is never conveyed, but simply becomes common knowledge. The Astartes does not lower his gun. He does not need to. All the points have been made between them. Everything is already reconciled in their parley, in this world of thought.

“You know me, don’t you? You know me.”

I sure hope so, in a sense you are the first person I have ever met.

Ben is no longer sure that he knows himself, though he knows he is tired. Now that he has seen himself from the outside, the various locks of indoctrination are broken, but what, he thought, am I What remains? Not knowing what he was going to say, and seized in desperation, he began to speak. “Please… please don’t let me remain here. My life weighs too much”

The psyker reaches out a hand again, and Ben takes it. In the next, instant it is as if everything is negated through observation. Almost like because he could see the roots of himself, he was free of them Will moved throughout him, possible lives and possible personhoods. At least he feels lighter now, so light as if he is perfectly free, but in the terrible absence of inclinations, of projects, he might be anything. Yet he could only be one thing- he could not walk back and honor all the moments that had died to create him. Thus trapped in freedom- like Buridan’s Grox caught exactly equidistant between two exactly equally appetising mounds of hay.

But something draws him out of himself again. Now, the psyker is before him, yet seems to have fallen to his knees. He sees the psyker as an interplay of light, whose beams turn in on themselves, reaching for something already possessed and held at the core, trying to hold onto what could not be lost, except by grasping for it. The psyker, he realizes, is also in that state of perfect indecision, facing much the same question- given that he wanted to honor those that constituted him and their various lives, what was he to be?

They faced their joint dilemma. When a life is paused, what natural way can there be to restart it? In this place of contemplation, habit or external impetus alone will not do for an answer. A rock alone will drift forever in space. Yet there was a single point, a singular known light beyond the world of his memories to which Benjamin felt himself flying, granting him the hope of an orbit. He might well hope, indeed he vibrated with it, but would his hope be welcomed, and how could he make the invitation? That was the wrong thought, an unbecoming selfishness, better to ask how can I help? Sandreal’s life should not be the scars of the lost- Sandreal didn’t deserve it, his lost creators didn’t deserve it. To help the helper, that was to be his orientation. But how?

Then Benjamin knew, and so he spoke:

“We do not mortify ourselves for the lost, but honor them in aspiration, or else the world would be mortification and without honor”.

Chapter prayer. Simple enough words, yet comprehension flashes across Sandreal’s face, as if remembering a forgotten word, still he does not rise, and looks at Ben expectantly. The space marine reaches out his hand. The psyker clasps it, and Ben helps the titan-smasher to his feet.

Everything begins with the remains of its predecessors, and yet beginnings are still worthy of celebration.

It is an agreement and in this place, an agreement of thoughts is a substantial thing, an anchor. There is the sensation of an unclasping, a paralyzed limb regaining motion or perhaps a pain so long present one had forgotten it, ending.

The Candle

Then both are laughing.

Will you leave this place with me?

It was not so much a question as a check on the alignment of his being. The answer was yes, and that realization was equivalent to saying it- more than saying it, being it. Ben hopes to be gone, to take the kinder of his memories to a kinder place, like a seed arc to a more temperate world. Not alone though.

Each raises their hands in a cheerful goodbye to ghosts, touch fingertips and then the pair vanish to a place we would not understand. Long would the squad and the inquisitor look for them, finding only the broken remains of the psy-cuffs.

The galaxy

[Finis]

Short bleg (please read)

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