The First and Last Chapter
Constantine burst from the officers’ lift in a black mood.
He’d wasted at least half an hour on some damn fool meeting requested by Severus, the preening bastard. Evidently, the governor was either missing or dead, conspicuous in his absence at the boardroom. As a result of the unnecessary diversion Constantine had been unavailable to command his vessel in its moment of need, its engines had been systematically destroyed and now who knew what xenogen devilry the tau were planning to inflict upon his crippled vessel? Rushing back to the bridge, he was unable to contact his command crew for a status update, and, to top it all, had found himself confronted by a grisly abattoir of ruptured Space Marines in the chapel outside his command deck. The Raptors had failed.
An imperial warship, Constantine believed implicitly, was impregnable. The religious certainty of the Navy’s dominance, of their ships’ deific majesty, had been drilled into him since his youth, years before. For his command to irrevocably collapse in such a short period of time; for his charge to be so crippled and sundered in his absence and beyond his control, it was a feeling not unlike falling. Everything he’d ever known, everything he’d ever been certain of and taken for granted, fell away from beneath him in a rush of flame and debris and blood.
Fine. Let it fall. But let it not be said that in his most testing hour, Lord Admiral Benedil Constantine had shirked his duty as a leader.
He would have Severus executed for ineffectual command, the time-wasting fool. He would dispatch messages conveying his great displeasure to the Administratum and to the Raptors’ fortress monastery on Cortiz-Pol. He’d regroup the Fleet Primus, file an immediate request for backup from the Secundus and Tertius armadas, then obliterate every last one of the grey-skinned abominations currently wreaking havoc aboard his vessel. Heads, he decided furiously, would roll.
Besides, there were still the Ultramarines. He’d drawn upon the Raptors to guard the vessel’s principal sections at Severus’s demand, aware that Captain Ardias and his men might well regard the choice as an insult. Well, it couldn’t be helped; the governor’s Administratum documents had given him implicit command over the situation, and if he chose to snub the warriors of Ultramar then there was nothing Constantine could have done about it. And that was likely a good thing; had the company of Ultramarines not been held back, they might not have been around to assist in his liberation.
With that thought in mind, he stamped from the elevator… and promptly found himself pinned against the floor, a long, wickedly sharp blade pressed against his throat.
“Nk,” he said.
“Radio for backup, and you’re dead.” The winged, miniature horse that had knocked him off his feet growled in a feminine, morbidly human-sounding voice, its narrowed, violet eyes boring into his own. Constantine didn’t remember anything about talking sentient equines in the intelligence reports on the T’au, yet here this thing was, pinning him down and holding a T’au-made knife against his throat.
“X-xeno!” Constantine flinched away from the contact, gasping as blood dripped from the xeno’s yellow fur and down onto him. He was briefly struck by the insanity of finding himself more terrified of contamination than of physical death, but the thought was quickly chased away by added pressure upon the knife. He almost choked.
“Who are you?” The xeno hissed, in crystal-clear low gothic, its hooves digging into his shoulders.
“J-just an ensign—”
“You’re lying.”
“...what?”
“I’ve seen ensigns, even killed a few. Your uniform’s the wrong color. Also, ensigns don’t have badges like that.” The xeno briefly tapped one of its blood-drenched wings upon the constellation of medals pinned to Constantine’s chest. He was briefly impressed that this xeno soldier (at least, he assumed it was a soldier) had picked up on the significance of those metals, but quickly recognized the thought as a dangerously heretical one and purged it from his mind.
“I’ll ask you again. Who are you?” The xeno asked again, the knife pressing into his throat, on the verge of drawing blood.
“No… nobo-”
The xeno cut his throat. It was white fire — a single burning ribbon of pain beneath his chin that sliced open with dreadful slowness.
No deep, he noticed, shaming himself with the cowardly relief he felt at the realization, not deep enough to kill. It was deep enough to hurt, though. A lot.
He whimpered as the pain continued to blossom, warmth pattering serenely across his collarbone, soaking into his robes. The xeno lifted the knife and returned it to where it had been, tensing for another slow, surgical slice. This time, Constantine could tell, the cut would be lethal.
“Admiral!” he groaned, begging the Emperor’s forgiveness. “I’m the admiral! In charge! Commander!”
“Thank you.” The xeno said curtly, the pressure against his neck abating slightly. “Contact the rest of your fleet. Tell them to fall back and leave the Eternal alone.”
“I’d rather die.” Constantine fought to bring a cold laugh to his voice, breaking through the quaver of fear and hoping the creature was convinced. “And even if I’d rather not, they won’t listen. They’ll know I’ve been compromised.”
For a long second, the xeno just stared at him, its purple eyes boring into his own. When it spoke again, he was a little surprised to hear its voice trembling a little. “...why?”
“Why we’d rather die than be killed?”
“Why you’d rather die than live!” The xeno roared. Full pressure was reapplied to the knife, making Constantine gag. “We have your ship! We have you! We have your fleet hopelessly outnumbered! Why won’t you just accept that and stand down?! Why won’t you stop all these senseless conflicts and pointless deaths?! Why can’t you just! Stop! KILLING?!”
“The-the Emperor-hrrk-doesn’t suffer xenos to live.”
The knife bit into his throat again, nicking at his skin. “That’s why?” The Xeno hissed, tears glistening at the corners of its eyes. “You can’t surrender because you’d rather kill yourself butchering us than let us live and walk away alive? All because we just-so-happen to be a different species?”
“...yes.”
Cut him cut him cut him cut him—
The voice hissed and raged in Fluttershy’s mind, singing a ceaseless song of blood and anger and violence.
Make him bleed cut him cut him—
It was a killing lust born of equal parts fury and exhaustion. It had only been a day since she’d been plunged into this hellish, war-torn nightmare realm, yet she’d already been through so much. She’d seen hundreds of soldiers thrown to their deaths solely to draw the opposing army’s attention with a diversion. She’d seen hundreds more, allies and enemies alike, shot and stabbed and torn apart and butchered, sometimes by the very weapons she’d been forced to scavenge from the blood-soaked battlefield in order to defend herself. She’d seen a leader of her newfound allies screaming in agony as he was tortured needlessly, the man responsible smiling with sadistic joy at the sight of another creature in such immense pain. She’d seen a thousand horrors that made a neverending Nightmare Night seem like a positively lovely alternative to whatever hell she’d gotten stranded in.
It would be so easy to just end it all in a flash of steel and spurt of blood right here and now. The gue’la’s leader would be unable to orchestrate this savage battle any longer, the decapitated fleet would have no choice but to withdraw, the bloodshed and violence would grind to a crashing halt.
But the voice… the voice made her hesitate.
She didn’t have to end this in violence. She could negotiate a surrender, force a conclusion to this conflict that didn’t rely on the squeeze of a trigger or the slash of a knife. And if she didn’t, if she ended it in an explosion of pain and rage just because it was less convenient to end it without bloodshed… then the voice would become her own.
On paper, it seemed so simple, so clean, so much better than a slit throat and yet another stream of blood to join the countless others soaking into the carpet beneath her hooves. In practice, however, it was none of the above.
Tell them to withdraw,” she growled, pushing down on the blade.
“I’m-hekkgh-telling you... it won’t work!”
“If you don’t, your people will die!”
“Fine! Do it, abomination! We’ll all die content, knowing that your kind are doomed! Kill me and be done with it — I won’t sully myself for you!”
The rage shivered in Fluttershy’s belly, the voice widening its pin-tooth grin and flooding her blood with fire. She almost wanted to laugh at her past self, at how idealistic it had been, how certain that friendship could prevail over everything and every problem could be solved if both parties just sat down, opened up to each other, and talked their differences out. She’d done that with this creature, and she hadn’t found any common ground with this creature, anything they could connect over; just a bottomless hatred for anything that wasn’t the same species as him. Her grip tightened on the knife and she prepared to drag it sideways…
The grey-haired gue’la sensed what was coming, moaning low in his throat, and she hesitated. It was trying to hide it, but it was scared.
And all of a sudden, Fluttershy found that she couldn’t slit his throat. She just couldn’t.
“...I guess we have that in common, at least.”
Her arm flew up, the knife burying itself in the wall. She swiveled around, trotting off the trembling gue’la as he scrambled away from her.
The voice raged in her mind, calling her a coward, a pathetic foal, a weakling who was leaving herself wide open for a killing blow from her foes, leaving her friends to die at their guns and blades.
Fine. She thought darkly as the strength left her legs and she toppled, consciousness slipping away from her as she landed on her side, everything fading to black. At least I’ll die knowing I was better than them.
Author's Note
Yeah, I know, there's other stuff I should really be working on. But this plot bunny got into my head and I had to let it out... and now I've let Khrone get into Fluttershy's head and turn her into an implacable killing machine with a kill count of over 50 guardsmen, a half-dozen Space Marines, and several artillery pieces and mecha. And counting.
