The Flight

[Okor]

His seat screamed beneath him, the steel of its structure struggling to sustain his weight, the innumerable corrosive substances leaking from his necrotic flesh forever tarnishing the supple leather. The blind of his window had been pulled shut, obscuring the whipping winds from his vision. He never understood the purpose of such portals. All they did was serve to remind the viewer of what was outside, which, in this case, was a drop of several thousand meters into a cold and unforgiving sea. They were merely a structural weakness, and an eternal reminder of the doom below should the mere mortals manning the vessel fail. At least a voidship would offer a vision of the Empyrean in all of its glory, the infinite tides of madness and power held at bay by nothing more than a pledge of allegiance to the fell powers that dwelled within its eddies.

But that was in a place of sanity and reason, where all things came to an end. Not in this foul mockery.

Claws seeping sewage gingerly turned a plastic page, the dark whispers from his helmet momentarily pausing, the dark pidgin of Gothic, Barbaric, and the black tongue of Daemons translating the alien symbols upon the surface. He muttered a silent curse, complementary to the susurrus of sinister speech suffusing his hearing. There was no opportunity to learn this arcane language in his youth. The roaming hordes of ravenous corpses, the struggle for survival, and his induction into the legions, denied him the chance.

He folded away the sheets and tucked them away in the pocket of the similarly luxurious seat before him, the discrete mechanisms within struggling desperately to decontaminate the leprous literature.

Tainted talons tapped on the armrest, the tightly-wound core of violence in every Legionnaire begging to be unleashed.

Why did he come here? Why did he offer to save the unfortunate secondaries caught up in Karl Jak’s multitudinous schemes?

He could offer up honeyed lies of justice, truth, and benevolence. He wished he could, that he could allay these suspicions and lay his eye upon a populace that, for once, was glad to see him.

But the truth remained. Dante’s Abyss was universally known as an orgy of bloodshed and slaughter, a no-holds-barred free-for-all, a pocket dimension of publically broadcasted murder and glory. Oh, of course they spoke of cooperation and locating the lost. Everything started with good intentions. Thunder shook the aircraft as it scythed through the air at speeds unthinkable by mortal men in their hovels of mud and straw.

But it all went sour, sooner or later. Perhaps giant insects would crawl from the earth, maybe every organism in this entire ‘verse sought to end all life. It was only a matter of time until he could bloody his gauntlets, drenching them in crimson as he unleashed his pent-up fury upon those unfortunate enough to stand in his way.

He would rip, he would tear, he would snap necks like brittle stalks of wheat before his scythe, he would kill, maim, burn, kill, maim, bur-

The crack of lightning tore him from his reverie, the acidic spittle that filled his mouth slowly sliding down his ravaged throat, his hands slowly uncurling from their previous posture, banishing the plague-ridden claws to the recesses of his memory. Gods, how he needed to break the habit. It had been an eternity since he had spilled the blood of primes, and such a travesty needed to be rectified, should one of his fellow participants trespass on his patience.

But for now, he needed to be civil. He needed to be respectable. He needed to be sane. He had ten millennia to banish his psychoses to the dark places within his mind, did he not? He had seen the slavering madmen that still clung to their legion-gifted arms like drowning men born aloft on flotsam, and he knew he was not among their ranks. The caustic saliva born of his Betcher’s gland sizzled as it ate away at his innards. All he needed was a foe, a subject of his hatred and attention, to leach away the madness that was not there.

He needed to distract himself. All around him were mysteries and a long plummet to his demise. An inglorious, forgetful death in a desolate realm unworthy of mention.

His armoured snarled, rust scraping against verdigris as he turned across the vermillion-carpeted aisle, looking to the tan-skinned man reclining in the seat, technologies the mechanicus could only dream of surrounding his skull.

”What… Brings you here, Prime?” Asked the gangrenous giant, his voice granted an underlying digital growl by the distorted speakers of his horned helmet.