Death Blade - Part one

I. Section 1. An Encounter.

I. Commander Casian:

Darkness, infinite, swirling darkness, the sound of a monstrous fire crackling, the tortured screams of the dying, a deep rumbling in the distance. With a mind rending bellow the hoarse whispering voice began, a dying scream, an insane cackle and a bestial growl crackling and hissing with fatty flames, filling his quivering hearts with an irrepressible dread. It was all around him, taunting him:

Casian…Casian…its almost time…your destiny beckons for you…I’m coming Casian, I’m coming for you… you will set me free…

Laughter boomed threateningly, all encompassing petals of red flame rushed up from the black to meet him. Resting in the centre of them was a great, dark hand, reaching up and chilling his very soul before pulling him down to what was most terrible of all: the face. The great face leered up at him, its single huge cracked red eye aglow, the other merely a gaping pit encrusted with rosy scar tissue. Its skin writhed with maggots and its pallid flesh was torn, rotten and puss covered. He screamed as he was pulled closer to its gaping mouth of broken, mossy teeth.

Hail me Casian, for I am your lord, Orageos, the greater of the twin Gods.

Then there was nothingness. Images began to swim into view… a few blurred shapes…dazzling white brightness…a deep voice in his head… couldn’t quite make out what it was saying… but before it could finish it faded into mirthful oblivion and Casian burst from the depths of insanity gasping for breath, sweat drenched and shuddering.

This time it was worse than ever. He had been cursed with these visions every night since as long ago as he could remember, but never this bad. Night by night they were growing steadily worse, these days Casian avoided closing his eyes until the leaden weights of sleep grew to become an irresistible force.

The Milky Way is a troubled galaxy. Casian knew that better than any man alive. Even as humanity stretched its fledgling wings as it struggled to rise from the shackles of an insignificant, overpopulated solar system, there was war.

Over the following millennia of seemingly endless bloodshed, an order grew, the mailed fist of the bloated and sprawling empire of man.

Casian sighed and ran his hand through his short black hair. Why couldn’t the people of the galaxy see them for what they were? Why revere an order of warriors with eternally bloodied hands? They called them the God-warriors, or Taui-kun. Casian could never understand that. Through his time as Legion Commander of the Angels Of Death he had killed enough men, monsters and aliens to smother a planet and been party to the destruction of entire solar systems. For this he was a Saint.

The drop ship rocked as it plunged violently through the stale atmosphere of a cold and barren planet with no name, nestled in a sector purged from human memory to protect the secrets it contained.

Casian was suspended by his restraints in a jet-black, tear shaped compartment moulded from the synthetic material called Mòrón, light as air, yet harder than diamond. Over the millennia it had become a symbol for the resilience and undefeatable might of mankind, a near indestructible exoskeleton that could turn an industrial cutting laser and remain cool in a storm of plasma.

Soon it would breathe a liquid sigh and remould itself around his naked body, a carapace of black silver to embolden and reinforce his fragile mortal flesh. It was a part of him, the embodiment of his sanctity, able to trickle in through the pores of his skin and crush itself down into a thumb sized organ that slumbered between the cannonaded pounding of his twin hearts.

A sharp beep cut between his eyes like a shard of insanity.

Commander Casian, these are your mission objectives:

And there they were, that chorus of one hundred, sweet, perpetually sedated voices that held the majority of the galaxy in their divine grip. They were the hallowed High Council of Earth, the rays of light that guided an entire race scattered and lost in the boundless infinity of a dark and unforgiving existence. From the ancient and arcane inner sanctums of blessed mother Earth they saw the universe. They were the most highly gifted of a subspecies of mankind who had been born licking the bittersweet juice of the forbidden fruit of knowledge from their greedy infant lips.

They were Psychic. Whilst normal man was rooted to the bank as he leaned forwards to drink the few precious mouthfuls of the water of time that were allotted to him, they swam in it, travelling against the overbearing current to sample the icy source of all things, then riding downstream to find the branch that held no rapids.

Establish a perimeter around the research station that is located at co-ordinates 112-654.
Clean out the corridors.
Protect the researchers.

As usual their orders were brutally skeletal and painfully concise. To Casian they sounded more like a shopping list than military orders. They may have been omniscient, but they were extremely conservative with the number of words they whispered into the brains of their servants. Perhaps because every word they broadcasted required them to surface from their knowledge stream, gasping and flopping like fish out of water.

Casian had a sensation they were toying with him, he could almost hear their childish lulling voices taunting him:

We could tell you exactly how many steps it will take you to reach the research station and how many researchers are still alive. We could tell you what each of your enemy are thinking and where each one stands at this moment. We could tell you the number of shots you will fire from your gun. We could even tell you the exact angle that the shot which will end your life will enter your neck… But it would not be so much fun that way would it?

In the not too distant future Casian would wish that his life had ended this day, because at the end of all things Casian would realise that today was the day that it all began.

II. Darkness:

“Come with me Bicarno… Give in to my will and become my servant. There is no more left for you in the world of mortal man.”

Bicarnos hand shook just a little as he raised the knife that was as black as his soul was becoming. It glinted slightly along its axis in the soft filtered luminescence of three fine slivers of moon.

He didn’t have to do this. He didn’t have to become this. But what alternative was there?

“No Bicarno there is no alternative. I grow impatient. Prove your worth and become your dreams.”

The doors of morality and sanity sighed heavily as the last slices of light flooding from them were extinguished.

“Hail Orageos” Bicarno whispered harshly to the eager ears of his craven deity as he plunged the knife home.


Bicarno stood on the verge of the crater that the research station squatted in far below, a pile of white pebbles. Casian would be there before long.

He pulled his pale withered hands from the sea of charcoaled robes that billowed around his ancient body and fantasised that he could crush those stubborn rocks in his fists and let their chalky dust join the omnipresent white blanket of blinding ash that covered this dead world.

Indeed he mused, caressing his neat triangular beard, was that so far from the truth?
He span smartly on his heels and took a few jaunty steps away from the station, his heavy glossy boots leaving no mark in the ghostly sand.

He watched the sky contentedly as, right on cue, great teardrops of black flame began to scald silently through the atmosphere; almost unnoticeable against the blanket of dark eternity wrapped around the planet.

He chuckled softly to himself and spoke eagerly to his master.
“It is all coming to place my lord, just as you have planned.”
From the very twisted and lightless depths of his soul the one he had devoted his existence to bellowed as deep as the gravity well of a black hole, shaking and crackling with unholy flames that licked the inside of Bicarnos skull like a pack of wolves scrapping the last slivers of meat from reddened bone.

Did you sow my seeds as I instructed?

“Yes my lord” he crooned “They hatched and have done your bidding. I marked the girl in her sleep, she lives yet.” The girl had been beautiful, the tinniest speck of humanity left in Bicarnos body was enough to tell him that. He spat at that notion in disgust. Beauty was immaterial and inconsequential. An enjoyment of beauty was a human phenomenon, the very stinking species Bicarno had barely managed to drag himself free from. The only thing with real meaning was the bidding of his God.
The only thing that was pleasing about the girl was the place she had in the conspiracies his master had been benevolent enough to share with him.

And Casian is coming for her?

“Yes” he hissed like an agitated snake.

Do as I instructed. Make sure that he lives and takes her with him. If you succeed in this I shall bestow further blessings upon you.

“Thank you my lord.” Bicarnos mouth creaked upwards into a twisted smile. He licked his cracked lips knowing he would succeed, there was not an amorphous shadow of doubt that he would fail. Great things were coming his way. He was a child again when he received praise from his lord. At least, that was what he believed, as it had been centuries since the last memories of childhood trickled away, mixing with the stream of his innocence that cascaded from his body as he embraced the damned one.

Now, it is starting now. You know what is required of you. Go.

“That I do lord.” As he spoke he faded away into nothingness and all was quiet once more.

III. Sniper Larian:

Larians pod smashed into the ground with a dull thud and threw up a plume of chalky grey dust. The walls in front of his face shimmered momentarily, then rushed towards him in a tide of glimmering black Mòrón. It collided with him with a quiet slap and clung stubbornly. For a moment it felt cold and then the familiar feeling washed down his body. No matter how many times you did it, it always felt decidedly odd when the material bonded with your skin; it felt as if you were covered with sticky clay that was beginning to dry out.

In less than a second it was over, the procedure was complete and now the material was a part of him once more. He held out his hand, clenched and unclenched it and flexed his fingers experimentally. Everything was normal, he was ready.

He unslung the long, heavy rifle from his shoulder and felt with relief its weight in his hands. He checked the sight, checked its balance, checked the power gauge. He clicked and unclicked the safety catch a few times, eventually leaving it off. His gun was ready for use.

The other pods smashed into the ground behind him while he was inspecting his gun, he didn’t twitch a muscle. He waited for a moment, then turned around; all nineteen of them were there and had fallen into line, ready for orders. He nodded to acknowledge their presence and raised his hand; they reformed, fanned out and ran to the top of the hill in front of them. He raised his hand again and they flung themselves silently onto the floor and snuggled into position behind their raised rifles.

Larian smiled. It always made him proud of the speed and precision with which his men followed his orders. It humoured him to think that he, the son of a contract killer and a woman he’d snatched as payment for one of his jobs would end up here, fighting for humanity, as a God. The lead sniper of the greatest legion of Taui-Kun.

But the memory of his home world and the bitterness of his losses soon quenched his smile and he returned to his usual grimace.

When Larian was nineteen, his home world, Hiran, was attacked by a fiercely hostile alien race known as the Iratui. The Taui-Kun came down from the heavens to fight them, he joined in arms with them, but it was no use. Every Iratui was killed, but in their dying moments they destroyed Hiran and on it everything Larian held dear. The only reason he wasn’t dead now was because Casian took him under his wing, he happened to be on the flagship when his world died.

He lost everything, his family his identity and his heart. Even now, a quarter of a century later the death of his wife, Elaine, still haunts his dreams.

Every night he was forced to kiss blood soaked lips that had once tasted so sweet, every night he would kick the beast that murdered her from her carcass, every night he would wake up with cold death saturating every cell in his body, screaming, sometimes in his head, sometimes not as he watched her last agonised seconds play out.

Since that day, as a symbol of his loss, he has kept his face covered from the universe that stole his love.

He ran his fingers through the dirt, the fine white dust parted easily in five ‘s’ shaped runnels to reveal the surface rock a centimetre or so below, it was like burnt bread dusted heavily with flour to hide the mistake.

He looked through his scope at the bulky research station, nestled at the heart of a gigantic crater, ten kilometres across, yet only three deep. Manmade or natural, it didn’t matter. It looked like a child had been sitting in the heavens playing a solitary game of marbles with several sizes of smooth white spheres, before dropping them down by mistake or design into this massive pit of chalky sand.

He could see Casian and his men heading towards it, tiny black specks against the omnipresent white dust. If no enemy became apparent soon they would enter the research station to clear it out, and Larians squad would become obsolete. The thought irritated him.

Deep down though he knew something would happen, the certainty permeated his whole being. He wondered what those innocuous white spheres could possibly have to throw at them.

Only at the time of his death would he finally realise what the full ramifications of this day were. It was destiny.

IV. Commander Casian:

Casian looked up at the thick black blanket that covered the sky. It was night, but on an industrial scale. This planet never saw the light of day, for long ago man had drawn a brush dripping with black solitude across the sky, blocking out not only the lethal radiation of the cold star the planet circled, but all of its meagre light and heat as well.

This, however, did not bother Casian. As the old mantra went:

Bless them,
Those to whom the darkness means naught,
Revere them,
For the blessed Taui-kun see in more ways than mortal man.

The eyes of the Taui-kun blaze with unnatural light, illuminating a world invisible to lesser beings. They can see in ways that mortals can barely dream of. Heat and density, through rock and flesh, able to spot the tiniest details at unimaginable distances, and all this while their enemy stumbles in blackness.

Rumours persisted that this even allowed a Taui-kun to kill with a glance. Whilst it was possible for Casian to glare at an opponent for weeks on end until he succumbed to radiation induced cancer, there are far more efficient ways to kill a man when you stand almost three metres tall, can crush rock to powder and lift five times your own bodyweight with ease.

He allowed himself the smallest taste of the surrounding air, sensors on the surface of his exoskeleton telling him that whilst near absolute zero in temperature and toxic enough to kill a mortal human in microseconds, it would not damage his augmented body. He had to allow it to warm half way through his exoskeleton, otherwise it would have frozen his mouth and lungs until they were as brittle and hard as slivers of flint. A small fusion unit hidden in the base of his skull provided the necessary heat.

The air was harsh and chalky, permeated with the dust that this planet was in such abundance of. On it he could taste blood, and something rotten and alien, not quite tangible. He could not guess as to what it was, only that it was the object of this mission, and that it had killed most, if not all of the researchers.

The research station dominated the view ahead of Casian, clean white silhouetted against the monotonous black of the sky and the shades of charcoal that made up the walls of the crater, their steep inclination making them the only part of this damn planet to avoid the dust. The largest domes were half a kilometre high, the smallest only about ten metres.

Behind him was the small force he had brought, numbering only one hundred in size, but what they lacked in numbers they made up for in skill, experience and firepower. They were divided into five squads of twenty: Sniper Squad One, Heavy Weapons One and Elite squads One to Three. Casian was at the head of Elite squad one. The snipers and Heavy weapons had gained vital positions on hills on the lip of the valley and were armed with energy cannons, HMG’s, energy lances and ITS (intelligent tracking system) Mortars. They were both ready to give a barrage of supporting fire on his command.

Casian’s and the other two Elite squads fell into formation and began to advance spectre like towards the station, their armoured feet making no sound on contact with the barren rocky surface of the planet.

Casian stopped, sensing something, which he didn’t know how to describe. He signaled for the rest of his squad to stop too. It was like there was someone or something near him. He could feel it; a shiver crawled up his spine; a bead of sweat crossed his forehead.

A flicker of black cloth rustled a few metres away. Casian suddenly felt a profound sense of nausea, his vision a misted mirror in a steamy room. He collapsed to his knees clawing at his skull as if he was trying to break it open. His eyes opened in terror as his vision went blazing white and as if looking through thick misted transparisteel, he could see a courtyard with marble columns. Out of the haziness five glowing figures seemed to glide forwards. Casian could just make out their elaborate gold encrusted ivory armor and mournful helmets. Then the deep voice opened up in his mind, this time he could hear what it said, but it was fuzzy and slightly warped:

“These……the fa……ardians, S……or, the greate……anile hand picked for th……y by the One himself. They……rotect this realm fr……reat with their lives. You must kill……”

The voice faded away with the vision and he was left, once more, with the face. It shrieked and a hoarse cry erupted from his throat as the voices started to scream at him again, louder than ever before

…I am here… I have come… I have come for your soul Casian…it is mine! …Give me your soul! … You will die!… I can show you the truth!… It is time…Casian.

Casian jerked and twitched as the voices devoured his sanity. Blood bubbled up from his mouth.

It would not stop. The eternal march of dementia eroded his consciousness like the tide wearing a cliff face, ever so slowly, but with the sharp edge of certainty.

This false reality you hold so dear will be drowned in blood and devoured by chaos and we shall meet and rejoice once more as father and son. There isn’t much longer left Casian, it begins today, this tale of the end times.

It ended abruptly. His eyes snapped open and a different, much more welcome voice filled his ears. Malian his first officer and close friend was shaking his shoulder

“Sir! Sir are you all right?” He repeated the question with more urgency.

“Yes Malian I am all right, as always.” he said wearily to his old friend. “I can feel it. Something terrible is going to happen this day. I have seen it in a vision. Be alert.”

“As always sir” Malian replied.

Visions were not an uncommon occurrence within the ranks of Taui-kun. Psychic potential was rife among them and it was not unknown for a man to be provided insight that could change the tide of a battle, predict an assassination attempt, or even tell him when to dodge an unseen death blow. To the Taui-kun, this was a gift for their courage, or a benevolent act from the high council. To mortals, it was further proof of their divinity. Casian had had several visions of such in his time, each one had come true in a matter of days, hours, even minutes.

He just hoped he was wrong about this.

V. Linwe:

Linwe crouched in the corner of her office in the deserted research station. Everyone was dead.

It had been horror in its most literal sense, sheer overwhelming terror, the sort of terror that grips you so hard you lose control of your body.

Death came swiftly and silently, it leapt down from no where in a cloud of obscurity, no one had seen them coming. The butchery had began almost without Linwe’s notice, she was in her sleek, surgically white office cubicle on her pulsing computer terminal, the first alarm she got was when a headless corpse was flung through the window in front of her. She screamed and collapsed, retching, struggling to breathe.
Then the screams began, the long tortured screams of people who are being ripped apart by indiscernible assailants. She stood bolt upright, horrified, too caught in trembling madness to move. She watched people torn open like wet tissue paper, heads disappearing with bone splintering crunches into clouds of spurting bright rich redness, limbs flailing, corpses twitching.

A woman she knew just barely ran from her cubicle screaming, her right arm reduced to bloody shreds and glints of reddened bone. She managed several agonised steps after her stomach burst open into a frothy fountain of sinewy gore. Her eyes bulged like over ripe fruit and her mouth sounded silent, unintelligible words of pain as her life streamed from her falling body.

Men and women in their dozens were flung like frail leaves in a storm into rivers of blood that seemed to have condensed from their cries of agony, thick contorted shadows made by heavy overhead lights dancing with them.

The stainless steel floor of the central plaza could not be seen through the rubble of death.

The creatures were almost visible by then, seeing as draped in robes of twitching internals and coated in a second skin of blood you could tell where they were. They seemed to be a vague insect like shape, covered in spines that impaled and tore. It was as if they were distilled from some terrible nightmare.

Friends, people she had almost come to think of as her family went down with the rest of them, Linwe felt every blow inflicted upon their bodies, and realised faintly that she was screaming with them. Any real sorrow she should have felt then was crushed beneath an avalanche of terror. The heart rending anguish of their loss would come later.

Unable to bear anymore, utilising immense force of mind, she broke the paralysis that entombed her body and leapt to the floor to hide behind her desk, shivering and sobbing, trying desperately to block out the screams.

So fixated was Linwe, she never saw the blood stained monstrosity that came for her. She felt burning pain shriek through her arm and realised dully that the redness soaking the floor was her own blood before collapsing.


All was silent now.

She knew she couldn’t stay here forever, she had to do something or they might find her again. Slowly she stepped up, wiped the tears from her eyes and straightened her hair. The wound on her arm made her feel faint all over again, it was at least thirty centimetres long and cut diagonally across her upper left arm almost right down to the bone, thankfully missing any major arteries. It had congealed sickly, by the looks of it badly infected.

Why was she still alive? Why hadn't the beast finished the job? She crawled across the floor, her hands slipping on the icy metal, jolts of pain shooting up her injured arm, and started rummaging around in her smooth pearly drawers. There it was: she picked up the old energy knife. She thumbed it on to see if it was still working, perfect; the dull blue blade blazed into life and hummed with deadly power.

Wishing to conserve what energy she had, she switched it of and the shining blade dulled back down.

It was a family heirloom; it had passed from one generation to the next for nearly a millennia. Once, long ago her ancestors had been space faring pirates, the tale passed through her family was that it had been taken from the body of a Taui-kun warrior, then remodeled to suit the needs of her distant ancestor.

Energy weapons were, and still are, incredibly rare weapons, of exquisite craftsmanship and deadly nature, almost never seen out of the ranks of the Taui-kun.

Its enameled hilt was intricately carved with elegant flowing symbols that spelt out her surname. Above that was her family crest, two sinuous serpents coiled around one another, twin faces glaring up and out of the etched hilt, fangs bared as if to ward off unwanted touch.

The blade was thirty centimeters long, the lethal weight of it in her hand comforted her.

She had never pictured herself holding it in her hands as a weapon of death, to kill an enemy, to sink its pulsing energies into living flesh and watch tendrils of sooty smoke rise from the cauterized wounds. She had even less imagined that she might be prepared to use it to take her own life. And then what? The blade that had been revered and cared for for a thousand years would be lost, clutched in the dead hand of the last of its lineage of bearers, its radiance guttering and fading after a couple of hours. Never to return.

Linwe was a twenty eight year old tomboy with long hair as black as the monotonous sky of the research colony. It tumbled onto her shoulders like a gleaming waterfall of ebony and crept down her back like a serpent. Her eyes were an endless dark green void that could suck the gaze of any man into their bottomless depths where the hapless man would drown in lust. It seemed almost impossible that she had managed to remain virgin after all these years.

“Wait for the right man Linwe. Don’t throw your love away.” Her mother had said as she lay on her deathbed, her voice as soft and helpless as a mewling newborn lamb, bloody blossoms staining the clean sheets she lay on, tears of pain and a sheen of sweat made her face shine in the soft, amiable light of the infirmary.

“But how will I know?” said Linwe, feeling as if leaden hands had her in a chokehold, tears of anguish starting to obscure her vision.

“He will come from the sky…” her mother sighed as her last breath whispered through her trembling lips. Then she was still.

Then Linwe was screaming as she fell to her knees, for a doctor, for her mother, and for herself.

She raised a hand and wiped her eyes. Her hand came away wet. Even after four years the wound was still red and raw. She supposed it always would be, and she wanted it this way, she wanted to feel the pain, she never wanted to forget.

She heard a faint noise and dropped behind her desk again, knife rekindled. She peeked around, she couldn’t see anything. Cautiously she stepped up and looked more thoroughly, it was nothing. She realised she had needed something else out of her drawer. She quickly rummaged around in it again and picked up a compact atmosphere pack. If she ever got out of here alive she would need this, the atmosphere packs on the temperature suits weren't very reliable. She had no plan of action for once she was out of the research station. She decided that she would see if she could get out and go from there, depending on the situation.

It was about five metres from the desk she was crouched behind to the exit from her office, then a further ten or so metres around the rim of the circular central plaza over the crumpled dead, in front of three other offices on the way, watched jealously by three dead occupants. Then she would be in the main corridor. Would everywhere be like this? Was she the only one? Yes to both. She knew it, and it horrified her.

She got up and scampered towards the door like a soldier ducking under a hail of bullets.

As she commanded it to open, a corpse collapsed through the door and stared up at her reproachfully. The carcass had half its head smashed apart like an apple that has been stamped on with hobnailed boots, the remaining half drooling its juices into a mushy puddle of ruined flesh.

The carcass had been eviscerated, the long winding trail of its spilt intestines trailing far out into the plaza. The stench from the puddles of spilt blood and semi-digested food and faeces was rancid, like a kick in the face. Bruised nose, pounding head, blood in mouth from a bitten tongue to suppress the scream that could have killed her. She fell to her knees retching and vomited copiously, then shook and shook as if the heating system were broken and the cold was beginning to make her fingers drop off.

The body was twitching spasmodically, one lifeless eye staring up past her into oblivion. She turned her face away from the corpse. She recognised that face even mutilated as it was, it was a young man named Chad.

“I love you Linwe, don’t you understand?” Chad had whispered once, his lips scant centimetres from hers, eyes wide and damp. She could feel his sweet breath against her mouth and as her gaze locked with his, she knew that she wanted this, she wanted him to be hers, she wanted it so bad she could feel it burning in her chest like a laser wound. But was this right? Was this what her mother had wanted for her? Was he the right man? Oh, how she wanted him to be, but deep inside her she knew that he was not. But did it really matter? What harm could it do? Then she saw her mothers fading eyes, watched her last breath tumble out of her body, never to be replaced, and knew that it did matter. She turned away from Chad, vision obscured by tears.

“I’m sorry Chad.” She choked and walked away, ignoring his desperate attempts to grab her attention. Then she ran.

Linwe realised she was crying, looking down at his corpse again, she felt guilty, then angry, why had she been left alive? Why did she have to live to see such horrors? Why had her mother cursed her to live the rest of her life in celibacy?
Linwe froze, she heard clattering footsteps echoing threateningly, slicing through the tranquillity like a knife. Then a rumbling growl shattered it completely. She felt hot stinking breath on her face, the next thing she knew was she had been lifted of the ground with a strong vice like grip around her neck. She tried to light her knife but she was shook roughly and the blade fell from her grasp and sank to the hilt into the ground, some two metres below.

She tried to scream, but the monster had her in a hold so strong she could almost hear her neck bones crunching under the phenomenal pressure.

She felt numb all over and her vision was starting to become blurry, her jugular throbbed angrily and she felt as though her brain was becoming liquid and sloshing around in her skull.

The last thing she saw before she slipped from consciousness was a huge shining figure in a glowing suit of armour that seemed to be crafted of ruby red flame appear from nowhere and dart gracefully towards her invisible assailant. It drew a shimmering blade and killed the creature with a single blow. Linwe tumbled through the air, unconscious before she hit the floor.