The Sister’s Library

He never said a word. Never. Throughout it all, the Black Sword didn't say a thing. The monster. The ghost. The mere shell.

What could be worse than this? What death could be as profound as this? What disappointment, what despair, could ever be greater?

Khârn raged at it. He howled in fury, coming at him again and again, shrugging off the wounds. He wanted the old one back. The one with some fire in his veins. He wanted some spirit. Just a flicker of something – anything – other than this flint-edged, iron-deep hardness.

They had laughed together, the two of them. They had fought in the roaring pits, and had sliced slabs out of one another, and at the end they had always slumped down in the straw and the blood and laughed. Even the Nails had not taken that away, for in combat the Nails had still always shown the truth of things.

'Be… angry!' he bellowed, thundering in close. 'Be… alive!'

Because you could only kill the things that lived. You couldn't kill a ghost, only swipe your axe straight through it. There was nothing here, just frustration, just the madness of going up against a wall, again and again.

The Nails spiked at him. He fought harder. He fought faster. His muscles ripped apart, and were instantly reknitted. His blood vessels burst, and were restored. He felt heat surge through his body, hotter and whiter than any heat he had ever endured.*

The Black Sword resisted it all, silently, implacably, infuriatingly. It was like fighting the end of the universe. Nothing could shake the faith before him. It was blind to everything but itself, as selfish as a jewel-thief in a hoard.

His chainaxe whirred as wildly as he'd ever thrown it, igniting the promethium vapour in the air, sending the blood lashing out like whipcord. He scored hits with it. He wounded the ghost. He made him stagger, made him gasp. The heat roared within him, turbocharging his hearts. He heard the coarse whisper of the Great God in his bruised ears.

**Do it. Do this thing. Do this thing for me.**

The ghost came back at him, tall and dark, his brow crackling with lightning-flecks, his armour as light-devouring as the blade he wielded.

Khârn became sublime, in the face of that. The violence he unleashed was like a chorus of unending joy. The ground beneath the two of them was destroyed, sending them plummeting in clouds of debris. Even when they crashed to the earth, they fought on. They rocked and swayed around one another, obliterating everything within the arc of a sword or the ambit of an axe-length.

'I… am… not…' he blurted, feeling the tidal wave of exhaustion drag on even his god-infused limbs.

*He realised what had been done, then. In the midst of his madness, even as the Great God poured himself into his brutalised body, he knew what transformation had occurred.

They had always told themselves, after Nuceria, that the Imperium had made the World Eaters. It had been *their fault*. The injustice, the violence, it had forged that lust for conflict, for the endless rehearsal of old gladiatorial games, like some kind of religious observance to long- and justifiably dead deities. That had given the excuse for every atrocity, every act of wanton bloodletting, for *they* had done this to*us*.

'I… am… not…'But now Khârn saw the circle complete. He saw what seven years of total war had done to the Imperium. He saw what its warriors had been turned into. He had a vision, even then, in the midst of the most strenuous and lung-bursting fighting he had ever experienced, of thousands of warriors in this very mould, marching out from fortresses of unremitting bleakness, every one of them as unyielding and soul-dead and fanatical as this one, never giving up, not because of any positive cause in which they believed, but because they had literally forgotten how to cede ground. And he saw then how powerful that could be, and how long it could last, and what fresh miseries it would bring to a galaxy already reeling under the hammer of anguish without limits, and then he, even he, even Khârn the Faithful, shuddered to his core.

'I… am… not…'He fought on, now out of wild desperation, because this could not be allowed to go unopposed, this could not be countenanced. There was still pleasure, there was still heat and honour and the relish of a kill well made, but it would all be drowned by this cold flood if not staunched here, on Terra, where their kind had first been made, where the great spectacle of hubris had been kicked off.

He had to stand. He had to resist, for humanity, for a life lived with passion, for the glorious pulse of pain, of sensation, of something.

'I… am… not…' he panted, his vision going now, his hands losing their grip, 'as… damaged…'The Black Sword came at him, again, again. It was impossible, this way of fighting – too perfect, too uncompromising, without a thread of pity, without a kernel of remorse. He never even saw the killing strike, the sword-edge hurled at him with all the weight of emptiness, the speed of eternity, so magnificent in its nihilism that even the Great God within him could only watch it come.

Thus was Khârn cut down. He was despatched in silence, cast to the earth with a frigid disdain, hacked and stamped down into the ashes of a civilisation, his throat crushed, his skull broken and chest caved in. He was fighting even as his limbs were cut into bloody stumps, even as the reactor in his warp-thrumming armour died out, raging and thrashing to the very end, but by then that was not enough. The last thing he saw, on that world at least, was the great dark profile of his slayer, the black templar, turning his immaculate blade tip down and making ready to end the last bout the two of them would ever fight.

'Not… as… damaged,' gasped Khârn, in an agony greater than anything the Nails could ever have given him, but with more awareness of the ludic cruelty of the universe than he had ever possessed before, 'as… you.'

And then the sword fell, and the god left him, dead amid the ruins of his ancient home.

My sweet and precious baby. You are so fucking dumb 😭

“HERE COMES PERTURABO WITH A STEEL CHAIR!”

Anyone else fascinated by the bizarre ass dynamic between sensitive, artistic Blood Angel Dominion Zephon and the crotchety super genius Arkhan Land?

Zephon self-exiled to Terra after losing both his arms below the elbow and sustaining mutilations to his legs in battle. The augmetics just would take. He could walk, but he his arms and hands were too twitchy to hold weapons or play an instrument. He gets dragged into the war in the Webway and Land jury rigs his arm so he can at least fire a bolt pistol.

Later, Land digs up some totally not forbidden tech and fixes Zephon’s limbs for real this time.

Short answer: yes!

Land's thoughts and behavior towards Zephon is always at odds with the effort he ends up putting into helping him. And Zephon is very patient with it. It's a dynamic goes between being really funny to sometimes quite sad.

While on the subject of these two already, you could dig up the quote where Land remarks that Zephon is beautiful, and before Zephon has finished saying "thanks, Sanguinius' gene-seed does that" Land immediately protests that he did NOT mean that in a flirtatious way and is far too smart and important to have feelings for people!

In front of a space marine who would not have made any of those assumptions in the first place and probably has no idea what Land is even talking about.

I thought that scene was hilarious.

Yes @dont-drink-paint that was quite funny. I dug that one up too: