Dance Macabre Pt 1
Traitor!Valdor AU Synopsis: The cycle begins again. And the one shard he spared. The one shard, in all his millenia, that he did not kill. Relations: You'll see ψ(｀∇´)ψ
She was the one and the only. The error in the code, the flaw in the machine, the exception to the rule. She was the shard that lived, the one and the only to be spared from the bite of his blade.
She was nothing exceptional in many instances. Slight above average psychic ability. A little above average of the Emperor's essence. Average intellect, strength, emotional response. Absolutely nothing at all. And yet she lived. She was the one, and the only, in all ten thousand years that the Traitor Captain reigned for his terrible, tyrannical rule before he was finally brought down and he ended the same way his master had ended: with golden ichor. Master and slave, Emperor and bodyguard, victim and assassin, let them be intertwined in death. Let him love Him, if only in death.
For all the years he had spent as a traitor, she was the only one who felt his wrath, and lived.
It was not love, the twisted thing they had. It was not even lust. He did not lust. He could not lust. He quite literally could not know desire. The one thing he had once cherished, worshiped, reveled in was dead, and He had torn out the machine that had been a heart when he betrayed Him. He had cast him down, through the gold and through the brume. His talons in his breastplate, His scorn upon His tongue, His hatred blazing in golden eyes as He speared Valdor through upon His claws and cast him down. That final, snipping cut, severing the bond between master and slave in a single, terrible instant upon the Vengeful Spirit.
It was no longer love. He loved Him, and He did not care.
He loved Him. He hated Him. He loved Him. He loathed Him. Around and around with the pendulum, desperate, broken, singing. The call of a mind stripped of all its gifts. Such a broken, piteous sight.
And so he hated His bones. His shards. His remnants. He did not know hate, his master had torn it out of him in so many regards, but he loathed them. He regarded them with no more kindness than if they had been Horus himself, as if they had been the ones to have poisoned him and given him the broken gift of being able to feel all he had lost. Of being just human enough to hate, to thrash and to weep against his chains, but without the true power to care, to know what he lost. Doomed to forever wander for a city he could not name and did not know, groping around blindly in the dark for something he lacked, but could not remember.
He loathed them.
He cursed their name the same way he cursed Horus. Horus, for his treachery. Horus, for his gift. Horus, for the way he had so gallantly smiled and welcomed Constantin with open arms when he had lowered the walls of the Palace, when he had broken the Siege of Terra alone and greeted Horus' hordes with gaping gates and scrambling defenses. Horus, for bringing him the truth.
Look at them. Despicable things. Wearing the face of his master as if it was a mask. He could not loathe Him directly, He had taken that away, but he could loathe them. He could loathe them for being Him but not being Him enough, he could loathe them for looking like Him, breathing like Him, living like Him once upon a time, he could hate them for carrying what should have been his. It was like looking upon the corpse of the sun, feeling its dying warmth screaming across the void but knowing it was held in the palm of a worthless mortal. A mortal. Nothing at all, when compared to him.
His master left His bones to the gentry instead of His servant. There was no greater insult than to see Him again, alive, living through their useless bodies, when He had died for their countless, dreary lives and they had lived. They lived for Him, they lived in His place, they're living and desecrating His corpse which should have so righteously remained dead. Let the galaxy burn, let it burn itself to ashes and consume itself under the weight of its voracious hatred, let the mortals stumble and fall and lead themselves to a piteous doom, he would have gladly let them all burn if only he could see Him again. If only to feel the warmth of His love, even if he had to torch Him alive to feel it.
He died ten thousand years ago. And in His place, they wear His corpse.
He sees His face imprinted upon theirs, he sees His bones, rotten and crumbling, stretched over their fragile bodies. He sees His essence, trapped inside, cradled in flesh and bone and it was his duty to tear it free. It was his duty to punish such blatant disrespect of His legacy, his righteous crusade to set Him free and return His soul where it belonged: in the palm of His favored servant. Let them all burn, he reasoned, let them all burn if only he could ignite his lord one last time.
When they fell into his claws, nothing awaited his master's bones but destruction.
It would have been impulsive for the normally heartless captain, if it had been any but his master. It would have been cruel, it would have been horrifying, it would have been treachery and blasphemy and heresy. But it was also justice. Justice, at least for him. Justice as he watches them scream, sob and wither away, as he watches their fragile bodies break down from starvation and dehydration, dying as their bodies struggle from the poisons pumping through their bloodstream, drowning in their own blood. How he replicates His wounds one by one, first the tendons, then the muscles, then the eye, and then the corpse itself. The Apollonian Spear, carefully, with infinite precision, carving tiny cuts upon them, bleeding them out drop by drop, tasting his lord's memories with each slice. Listening to Him screaming as he sets his boot down upon a fragile, mortal chest, hearing Him roar out in indignity and in betrayal as he presses down and hears the shard's ribs crack and then crumble beneath his weight, as their chest finally gives out beneath the endless pain. And feeling Him die, once more, blood dripping like ichor over the Apollonian Blade, finally preserved in the last tomb He would ever know: the very spear of his servant. Home again at last, as He deserves to be.
He will kill them all. It was spoken in his vows.
There is no respite for a shard in the Yellow King's arms. There is only oblivion. He will never spare them, never love them, never hold even a candle of adoration for his former master. To those that dare desecrate His corpse, there is only death, and a slow, horrifying drowning, lost limb by limb to uncaring treachery. He always kills them, as soon as the Aquilan Shields are scattered, their shields shattered and their spears cast aside. His brothers are nothing compared to him. They always die, in hours, or in days if the Aquilan Shields are resourceful, if they're willing to sacrifice themselves for the shard. They rarely succeed, of course. He is Constantin Valdor, and he is the Emperor's greatest assassin, and he will tear His soul shred by shred from the mortal corpses He wears.
When he has them, they always die.
She alone was the exception.
In all ten thousand years, she was the only one who has faced his wrath, lost by the Aquilans, and lived.
She was an Inquisitor of the Ordos Malleus. She had been the one hunting him, the King in Yellow, until the day he caught up to her, and tore her ship open in the middle of the Warp. The Aquilan Shields had come soon before, they had told her what she had to know, and in the Inquisitor's arrogant, off-handed way, she had dismissed them. She had dismissed the fear she saw in their eyes, dismissed it the same way she had dismissed her concerns and plunged into her hunt.
She still remembered that day, the golden devil clad in the raiments of his lost brothers, his cloak a ragged, dead thing hanging over his shoulders, glorious and golden and horrifying as he gutted the ship apart hunting for her. The fear in Ashavar's eyes, visible even through his helm. The way they danced, blade over blade, spear against spear. Valdor fought in his peerless, immaculate style, but now with vicious abandon, the mark of a soul that had nothing left to lose. They had prepared for this. They had prepared a thousand contigencies for this day, yet none of them would serve them at all. Ashavar clashed against him, forcing all his strength into a strike that made even Valdor stall. He punched him in that gap, without fitness and without grace, without any of the training Valdor had enforced upon him. He smashed one of the jewels on Valdor's armor, ducking under Valdor's riposte and dancing around the edge of the Apollonian Spearblade before Valdor stabbed him in the gut.
There was utterly no honor at all.
Valdor struck him three more times with the misericordia, Apollonian Spearblade briefly forgotten. He smashed his fist against the side of the Aquilan's helm when he had stumbled, pinning him to the bulkhead with one hand and bashing him against it for good measure. Casting him aside as if he weighed no more than a guardsman, Valdor had turned around to face her. And the Inquisitor had not fled. Gazing up into those blank eyes without even a hint of fear, she raised her own vox and spoke a single, terrible command. Her lips were trembling from nerves. But her eyes were calm, and dead, and utterly triumphant
‘Ship command. This is your Inquisitor speaking. Activate the Cyclonic Torpedoes we're carrying. Activate all of them.'
That was her secret. She had been willing to kill both herself and him even before she had set out upon this journey, before she had met the Aquilan Shields. The captain goes down with her ship.
That brief, brutal moment of deathly cunning flashing through red eyelenses. The moment of revelation, spreading like ink through water. The way she had smiled, vicious, cruel, and victorious.
The Inquisitor had smiled mildly at him, and gave a nod in the direction of the engines. His eyes had tracked that movement, just for an instant, flickering between her and her command box.
'We'll die together, Constantin.'
She was still triumphantly holding her command box when Ashavar pounced.
He crashed onto not Valdor, but onto her. He had wrapped her up beneath his bulk, covering her entirely with his body. She could smell his incense, feel the cold hum of his auramite and feel the bruises forming from where he had smashed into her. He crushes her with all his weight, covering her, wrapping around her. She couldn't breathe but still she tried to scream. If not for herself, then for him. She couldn't see, Ashavar's purple cloak had obstructed her face, but she could feel him. The first misericordia blow shattered his auramite. The second broke through his spine. She could feel him convulse, spasming at least a dozen times beneath the blows. Valdor was so fast, so unspeakably fast, and vicious in his frenzy to get to her. To claw her out and tear out the Emperor's last breaths from her broken corpse. Ashavar groaned above her, and she could hear that voice, so commonly kind, so gentle, now raised in agony. A scraping sound. Ashavar spasmed. A siren was blaring somewhere from lower down on the ship. Then nothing. Ashavar's blood was clouding her eyes. His cloak was soaked with it. His slumped form, once so gigantic, briefly dwarfed by Valdor's looming shadow, now emptying itself of life.
He had thrown himself over her, and Valdor had cut him to pieces.
'I'll see you again, my master.' It was a curse, as much as a promise.
The traitor Captain had left. Fled, like the coward he was, out of fear or rather "pragmatism", when he realized he would not have time to cut through his brother's corpse and escape the burning supernova of the ship. Fled to kill another day.
She remembers the Aquilans, their panicked voices, their spears and their axes. The way their Shield-Captain had bundled her up in his cloak and frantically tried to wipe the blood from her hair. Two Custodes carrying Ashavar through the winding corridors, ducking beneath the panicked crew. The Shield-Captain's voice, soft and mournful and still trying to be gentle, carrying her wounded form away from the fire. Away from the blood and that terrible, bloodstained cloak, whisking her away before the ship could implode beneath its own baggage of fire.
It was not the first time they would meet. And it was not the first time she would know, with cruel certainty, that he hated her. He hated her, as he hated all shards, and if he had the chance, he would have undoubtedly flayed them all alive, just for another sip of his master's love.
He loved his master. And he hated His shards.
~~~
They had scolded her after that stunt. The Aquilans had scolded her, their red eyelenses masking their fear. Fear for her, fear of him, fear of her and the lengths she was willing to go. They insisted on accompanying her on her walks, on tracking every moment of her health, and standing over her during her meals. It was infuriating. (Then again, she couldn't blame them. Her great-great-great-great ancestral grandmother had apparently been exiled after a much-similar failed coup. That stunt had garnered her much worse than just a few days of annoyance from Aquilan Shields being too overprotective of their charge).
She knew she was dead long before she had set foot upon Daedalus Lied, she had known she was a dead girl walking before she had even baptized her own ship after a long dead genius. The Inquisitor knew that she had been waiting for death since her love had last perished beneath the flames of a heretical cult she had failed to root out, she knew that not even her love of humanity(the Emperor's or hers now?) would have been enough to stop that tide of ink-laden despair that had threatened to pull her down since that terrible night. She had loved them, yes, she had loved this world, with every last of its worthless, tiny, miniscule lives, loved each of them to a vague, beautiful detail, but it was not enough, not enough to overcome her selfish wish for death. To be eternal, and endless, and be with her love in the lightlessness.
She was nothing, in the grand scheme of things. Nothing but an Inquisitor with a dead psyker-assassin as a lover, a dead love she couldn't even stop from self-destructing from the waves of the warp. Nothing but an Inquisitor with a deathwish and the dying gasps of her beloved, and the heart of the Emperor beating within her. She was alone, so utterly alone even with six Aquilans watching over her, and perhaps that was why he spared her.
All those other shards. Mortal. Joyous, mischievous, alive, young in a way she could never be young, frivolous and dainty and pretty. He had killed them all. Those who were cruel, a king clad in gold and crimson, a budding emperor with a tyrannical fist, those he would occasionally spare, just to gaze upon Him for a few moments longer. Inevitably, they would extinguish, snuffed out once more in this incarnation. They always died, she knew, she knew even as she relived the moments of the many girls he had slaughtered. Their eyes, reflected in his cold, unfeeling auramite, their screams, echoing through the corridors of the past and into eternity. So small, so fragile, and so utterly dead beneath his gaze.
He met them again, in the span of months after her recovery but before the Aquilan Shields could truly let go of their fear. They still hung about her, wandering meaninglessly, fussing over her every beck and call. Months had passed. Her investigation, slow and grueling, had led her, with stealth and trickery, to the heart of the storm. To the traitor Captain's own lair. Maulland. The dead world where a fallen prince had once lived in exile.
He met her, face to face, in the gaping emptiness between the dead earth of Maulland's primary moon, the grey and white of the snow sailing over her uniform. The moon itself had no name, although its inhabitants had taken to calling it the Priest-King, out of some last kind of spite for the exiled captain that had once lived upon the world. He had lived here, peacefully, in silence, in contemplation and in grief, until his hate brought him out to hunt. Until his loathing for his master's corpse and his master's throne drew him out, and he rampaged.
They had stood, immobile, and for a while she heard nothing but the empty howl of the storm.
'You are here to die.' Valdor said at last. There was no tone of inflection in his voice, no sign of regret. Only flat, cold victory. She had returned his words with a smile, and a nod.
'And you are here to slay me.'
The traitor captain had smiled then. It was a cold, insane smile, the smile of a large starving cat finally having a fresh meal. He will kill her and carve her apart, of that the Inquisitor had no doubt. So be it. She was, as always, ready to die.
He hated her, she knew. He hated all shards. Good. She hated him too. She expected to die.
'Of course.' he gestures in a curt bow, similar to the bows he had demonstrated countless times to his master when they were King and Servant. 'I did not think you were quite as arrogant as you may have your entourage believe. Where are your bodyguards, Inquisitor? Where are your troops? Have they abandoned you tonight?'
'They're preparing to slay you, I presume.' she chuckled darkly. She doubted if any had advanced as far as she, to the point of striking out against the very heart of his traitor kingdom. It was not his throne, but it was his heart, the King in Yellow's long years of ruminations and exile baked into the very snows of the planet. She wondered if he would suffer, maybe crack a little inside, if she declared Exterminatus upon the world and its inhabitants. She wondered if he would mourn. Certainly not mourning for the planet's residents, or even for himself, but for all the years and memories he had spent, and lost, there.
Valdor had tilted his head. 'Ah. You have questions.' So coldly monotone as ever, so pleasant, even when he lowered the blade. She wondered if he had been so kind upon Ararat.
She had advanced then, moving towards him without fear. She could sense the Aquilan Shields' anxiety through her headpiece, hearing their auramite sevros crackle, feeling them tense in anticipation. Lehievin drew in a sharp breath. The Shield-Captain was ready in position, waiting to snap the jaws of the trap closed, waiting only for her word. She did not give it.
'You know what we are here for. Your crimes. Your sins. Your treachery, captain-general.' she met his gaze, and did not let him drop it. 'The slaughter of your own brothers. High treason to the Throne. Rebellion against the Emperor. The sabotage of loyal Imperium defenders. The destruction of the Palace. Consorting with the dark gods. By the authority of my office, by the word of the Inquisition and Ordos Malleus, and by the power vested in me by His words, you are forfeit of this city. You will be taken to Holy Terra and tried in fair and open court. Your fate will be determined by your brothers, and by Lord Guiliman himself. May the Emperor have mercy on your wretched soul, captain-general."
Her words seemed to amuse him, in some broken, forgotten way. 'I see,' he said at last. 'And what makes you think I will obey your fickle office, when I have, by your own words, rebelled against the Emperor Himself?'
Her lips twisted into a thin smile. Harshly, she laughed, brutal and barking and laughing against the wind. He simply crossed his arms over the shaft of the Apollonian Spear and listened to her.
'Because you know, Constantin.' she finally growled out. 'You know you can't win, not against six Aquilan Shields with teleporter beacons and a direct line to Terra's reinforcements. That's why I'm not going to lie down and wait for you to kill me, like all those other shards you've captured, Constantin. You hate them. You see them and you kill them on sight. Sometimes, the best outcome is for them to escape your grasp, hide away, rot the rest of their lives in oblivion, and never be found again. Cause when you capture one, you torture every drop of life from them, and make sure they're just as dead as Him when you're done. How truly pathetic of you, Constantin.'
Nothing, not even a shift of his posture.
'But do you want to know why I'm here, captain-general? Do you truly want to know?'
'Yes.'
'I am your executioner, Constantin. You have simply lived too long. Your execution is tonight, even if mine is too. We'll die together, Constantin. Me, the shard you called your master the last time, and you, the servant. There will be no shards after me, and I suppose none before me either.' None that could have harmed him and unsettled him.
Thunder lashed in the distance. The storm whipped at him, driving jagged spikes of lightning over his auramte-clad features. The Apollonian Spear, always activated, grumbled in the dark. Its ornate carvings were encrusted with old blood, the blade gleaming dully in the gloom.
'You are going to watch your bodyguards die, my master. Their blood will be on your conscience.'
She snorted.
'I am not your master, Constantin. And conscience? You dare speak of conscience? Merely look at what you've become, and dare to utter the word conscience? Go on, preach to me of conscience and loyalty, traitor. It was not I who betrayed His throne.'
For a long moment, he said nothing. For a moment he seemed to nearly recoil, as if this encounter had suddenly gone too far from his plans.
'Surrender, captain-general.' she insisted. 'Kneel, and you will be dragged to Terra in golden chains. Refuse, and your corpse will be dragged to the Emperor in rags.'
'You are a fool if you think I can know fear, Inquisitor.'
'This is not about fear. This is about surrender. You cannot make a stand here.' There was not a trace of desperation in her voice now, but a trace of anger. Lehievin shifts from beneath his cloak, guardian spear in hand. Ophiel and Ashavar's names were engraved upon his breastplate. Two new names, to remember them. He no longer was thinking about the deeds that had earned them, merely the Custodes that had been sacrificed. His brothers. They were his brothers, and Valdor cut them to pieces. 'This is arrogance, captain-general. Madness. You, alone? You cannot face us. You have no armies. No weapons. No defenses. No allies. You have nothing left but yourself, standing here now.' Serenely, almost as if to comfort him, she smiled. 'And that's not enough. Surrender. Surrender, simply, and I'll treat you well. I'll be the only shard that will.'
Because, in some deeper, ancient portion, He loathed him too. He loathed him back, and His shards had always felt this hate. The sense of shattered loyalty and vengeance against the traitor captain.
For a moment, just enough for Lehievin to draw in three breaths, Valdor seemed to listen. If not precisely even think of accepting her offer, then to at least resign himself. For a moment, he looked almost like the broken thing he was, yielding to treachery because he knew no way out. The mind of someone without even a right to dream, and now having no other way but to scream soundlessly for eternity, crying its tears out for someone that did not know how to weep.
Had Valdor wept when the Emperor died? She found, with no great surprise, that she did not care.
'You will die braver than most, Inquisitor.' he finally said. The Apollonian Spear, already kindled, guttered to life. Its aura, now streaked with red instead of blue, crackled against the vengeful storm. 'You remind me of a High Lord, so long ago in the past. I suppose you do not remember. That is alright. But for life to move onwards, the secret does not lie in the future, but in the past. Humanity's future is dead, Inquisitor. It is as dead as my master, rotting upon His throne. His past, however, is alive. It is what drives your fickle race, it is what keeps them alive, sloughing along just for one more day. You are nothing but His dreams from the past, still imprinting themselves on the present. None of you shards have a future, and none of you will have a past.'
She watches the Apollonian Spear swing with some kind of daze. He moves towards her then, not aggressively, but the display of power was still blatantly naked. Something was moving in the snow and the storm, something was roaring that was not thunder. It was something dragged out of the past and torn from its grave, mangled memories tearing through a life that could not remember it. It was the growling of an ancient, dying beast roused from its slumber, uncoordinated and savage and so mindlessly hateful that they would have followed this crazed captain like a prophet.
'We have no future, you and I. Which is why I am telling you this now, so you may heed it, one last time, before your endless life extinguishes itself again, my Emperor. Rejoice, my lord.'
Lehievin could wait no longer. He gave the signal to strike, even as their charge seemed to be frozen, hypnotized before Valdor as he steadily advanced towards her. Three Aquilans closed in upon him from the side, their guardian spears gleaming as they rose like vengeful revenants from the grave and threw off the disguise fields ripping around them, teleporters furiously blazing as reinforcing Custodes descended upon the traitor captain. Lehievin pushed himself, shrugging past his lieutenant, auramite sevroes grinding as he sprinted, already-superhuman capabilities strained to the limit as he charged. He had to reach her before he did. He had to reach her before Valdor did....
The Apollonian Spear was hefted into its killing position.
In the heart of the storm and its wrath, where the rock was as black as oil and the thunder as hateful as storms, red-tinged helmets blazed from bronze armor, and began to advance.
Somewhere, in the distance, was an eerily familiar, ragged laugh.
'Rejoice, my dear Emperor, and gaze upon the corpses you've betrayed. You are present once more at their very first engagement.'
As Lehievin finally closed the distance, and his spear scraped against the spine-jarring thrust of Valdor's killing strike, the thunder descended to earth.