u/Fearless-Obligation6

Major spoilers for the Legends of the Wolf omnibus & Helwinter Gate. Over the course of Chris Wright's Space Wolves trilogy we are introduced to Baldr Fjolnir, a Grey Hunter of the Space Wolves Chapter who over the course of the books we discover he is awakening psychic abilities. Unfortunately for him the thing that kick starts his powers is an attack by a Death Guard sorcerer that almost leaves him corrupted. He is later inspected by Njal Stormcaller, High Rune Priest of the chapter and has a null collar placed on him to block his psychic powers which as the story progresses starts to slowly kill him as it was intended as a temporary measure. Fortunately in the third book when his pack makes it to Cadia during the 13th Black Crusade attempting to stop the assassination of Ragnar Blackmane they encounter an Eldar Farseer that is willing to break the collar in exchange for returning her soul stone to her Craftworld. Now free of his collar he could unleash his power:

He was surrounded, all the time, up close. Not by physical bodies – by minds, by souls, crowding at him, clamouring for him, reaching out spectral hands to drag him down.

Baldr knew that his body was in motion. To some degree, he retained full control of it – his limbs moved as they should do, his eyes witnessed the clamour and destruction, his mouth spoke and his hearts pumped. And yet, the divide between the worlds had thinned, blurring into a mist of time-fractured impressions and ghost-images. The souls of those he slew were like hot coals in an empty brazier-pan, glowing faintly, apt to be snuffed out by a gust of air or a smatter of water.

He saw the structure of the fortress towering away in semi-translucence like some gigantic hololith. The walls and the floors were hard to pinpoint, but the souls within it were not – they were points of fire, flickering, moving, whirling like a star field. They were beyond counting, and more streamed into combat with every moment, fuelling the inferno that made the foundations of the fortress shiver.

Not all those fires burned equally brightly. Most were dim and easily extinguished. A few raged with intensity, looking as if they might resist the rigours of the storm ahead, even flourish in it. Many of those souls fought for the enemy, and their auras were edged with strange resonances. Others were clearly defenders of the kasr, leading desperate charges to shore up defences and claw back lost ground. Baldr could sense types, too – mortal humans, those corrupted by the daemonic, those who had lived for mere decades and those whose threads were centuries old.

Most intensely of all, he felt his own self, his own essence, raging at the bonds his body placed on it. He could feel the pressure of the forces within, struggling to escape, to unleash. He could do it now, here, exploding at any point of his choosing and sweeping all resistance away. The spirits of the ice were snarling and unravelling, ancient war-gheists that had always been there, just sleeping, just suppressed, now unfettered and lusting for violence. They bore raiments that he recognised – ravens, serpents, dragons of the deep, and, most salient of all, the monstrous wolves, their fur matted with blood, their teeth long and yellow, their eyes as red as the world’s end. Just keeping those avatars in check now took almost all his strength, pressing them down into the depths of his psyche, grasping them by the nape as they slavered and leapt.

‘Ahead now,’ he murmured, almost to himself, only dimly aware of Ingvar running at his side. His pack-brothers were like shades, their outlines lost in the darkness, only their souls strongly visible. Gyrfalkon’s was stark and vivid, a cold star that burned in the gloom, made colder by his long years of exile. Olgeir’s was huge and generous, though checked now by suspicion and doubt. Hafloí’s was the brightest, the hottest, but also the most brittle. And, far off, he could still just make out Skullhewer’s aura, the mightiest of them all, though obscured now, beset on all sides. How long could it last? Was it already on the road to annihilation, just to buy a little more time?

They were close, now. The vaults rose up around them, ever more immense, gathering themselves up towards the undergates and the mighty galleries, places where the fate of the kasr would be decided. He could feel Blackmane’s presence, sense the furnace of his existence, hotter and more striking than any other, though also surrounded, also obscured, as if smothered by a hundred lesser entities, all trying to sink their claws into him and bring him down.

The beasts within him growled, opened their eyes, exposed their teeth. They could not be held back forever, not in this place, where the fury of ancient powers had already been let loose and the warp itself lapped at the corpse-thick shore. They knew where he was headed. They knew what was taking place within the walls and under the earth.

He needed to hold out a little longer. Just a little longer.

Time was running out, space was running out.

Just a little longer.

Olgeir ran too, his chest aching, his limbs aflame, his hearts thumping fast. The tunnels ahead still offered plenty in the way of prey – the barricade had been an incomplete barrier, one around which roving bands of cultists had managed to infiltrate via any number of other routes. Brutal battles still took place in the dark – Militarum forces grappling with enemy fighters, taking back some chambers before losing others, locked in a grim struggle for every inch of ground. Sounds of combat came from high bridges above, glimpsed as the pack ran across the base of great shafts, or from below, when they skirted pits that seemed to descend into the bowels of the planet itself.

They could not pause, they could not hesitate to support the beleaguered Imperial positions, only keep going, driven onward by Baldr’s unerring other-sense. It sickened him to see the unravelling of the defences, the slow erosion of the entire kasr’s vast foundations. It sickened him, if he was honest, to do so in the pale glow of witch-light. For that was what it was, in all truth – an echo of forbidden power, one that should have been placed in rigorous bonds, marshalled by the Rune Priests and judged every day for all the long years of aspirant training. Just being close to it, unbound and clearly fluctuating in intensity, tore at him. More than once he’d hefted his weapon, not against an enemy, but close to Baldr, just in case, just in case. And each time he’d pulled back, seeing his pack-brother’s determination to master the power, his drive, the runes on his armour burning hard, one by one, just as they had done on Njal’s own sacred battleplate, just as they did with every gothi who had earned the trust of the Chapter.

.....

The las-bolts flew, the blades flashed, and a dozen gauntlets reached out, desperate to haul him down and finish the job. A chain-length whipped around his blade-arm, weighing it down. A power-knife plunged up into his armpit joint, puncturing the muscle, before he swatted its owner away.

As if in sudden premonition, Ragnar’s mind briefly flashed back to Fenris, to the night-storms of the wide oceans, the fury of the endless, frigid tempest where battles raged in an endless cycle between tribes forever on the edge of annihilation. He would have given anything just then to have his old companions at his side, even if the odds still counted against them, just to fight back to back in the ancient way, blades whirling in counterpoint, roaring out both defiance and denunciation.

‘Heidur Rus!’ he thundered, crashing anew into the traitors, smashing them aside in a last, final, bruising heave.

*And, against all hope, the call was answered.

‘Hjá, jarl!’

The battle-shout came from more than one throat, a cry that echoed down the long tunnel. Four figures sprinted into view, grey against the black of the tunnel’s edge, fighting hard, laying about them with blade and bolter. One was huge, bellowing every war-curse known to the Chapter and opening up with a heavy bolter that shredded and pulverised. Another looked raw and pale for a Grey Hunter, but fought in their manner nonetheless, slaying expertly with a short-handled axe. The third moved faster and more surely than either of them, and his rune-carved power sword would have been recognised by even the rawest aspirant of the Chapter. All of them fought furiously towards Ragnar, hewing a path through the assassins, creating panic in the rearguard and breaking up their disciplined onslaught.

But it was the fourth who dominated. It was hard to lay eyes on him. Hard even to see what kind of thing he was, only that he carried the icons of Fenris along with him in a ghost-grey tide, flickering and shimmering, caught between the world of the senses and the world of dreams. He was greater in stature than he should have been, though still in the form of a Sky Warrior, his gauntlets snarling with ice-white lightning, his eyes flaring. Creatures bounded alongside him, spectral and fractured – clouds of ravens, as thick as curdled storm fronts, swooping and ripping with translucent beaks. Greater beasts roared within the miasma – all creatures of the Fenrisian bestiary, the hunters and the hunted, thick hides and snarling maws, loping, panting, ripping into the stunned warriors and mauling them apart. Some were shaggy and gigantic, others sleek and long-limbed, and at the forefront, as ever, was the greatest of them all – the hulking blackmane of legend, yellow-eyed, bloody-fanged, slavering through the carnage as if summoning the end of all worlds.

Ragnar recognised the pungent tang of the wyrd, the same tingling aura created by the gothi when they invoked the storm. Maybe it was rawer, a little wilder and more strident here, but it was the same basic thing. Njal himself might have been proud of the terror created in that tunnel, the screams and the growls, the wind-howl and the lightning-snap.

He took full advantage, launching back into the enemy and adding to the slaughter. Caught between the devastation of the gothi’s art and the physical fury of the Grey Hunters, the assassins’ discipline broke at last, making them easy prey. Frostfang whirled, carving into the reeling knots of a suddenly desperate enemy, while the looming blades of the Grey Hunters made quick work of those at the rear.

What followed was butchery – brutal and blunt-edged, swept up in the swirl of the gothi’s rampaging wyrd-beasts. Ghostly they might have been, but they were still capable of dealing out real damage. They swept up and around Ragnar’s own strikes, the ravens swooping in the lee of his flying pelts, the serpents coiled about his striding boots, the wyrd-wolves pouncing in the shadow of his chainsword. He felt as if he were immersed in magicks, his blood boiling with them, lending strength to his every blow and burning the pain from his wounds.

As the revenants swirled and dived, he fought his way to the side of the Grey Hunter, one whose armour-marks he recognised from a long time ago, and they slew together in the heart of the witch-light-flickered darkness.

‘Gyrfalkon,’ he panted, working his blade fast and hard. ‘It has been a while.’

The Grey Hunter carried on fighting, his movements unrestrained and lavish, as if energies held back for an eternity had suddenly been let loose.

‘You told me to keep the edge of my sword sharp,’ Ingvar replied, sending it whistling into the neck of an exposed traitor. ‘I did as I was ordered.’

.....

The fighting never truly stopped, after that. Five hundred trained killers took a while to purge from existence, even with the help of Baldr’s horde of storm-magicked allies. The noises of combat had drawn the attention of the real enemy, and while the Fulcrum Hunters still fought their desperate rearguard action, the first outriders of a greater invading army were already filtering up the winding tunnels towards them. Baldr’s wyrd-beasts tumbled through the dark like crashing waves, flushing out the last resistance in a surge of dream-cast fragments, just in time for the first of the Heretic Astartes to arrive.

Given all that, there was no time for explanations. Ingvar fought at the side of the Young King, and was soon given a reminder of just how deadly the jarl was when given freedom to move. Shadowed by the spectral beast-spirits, he was nigh-unstoppable – like a vision out of the ancient myths, pulled from a time before the Imperium had stamped its mark on the mountains. Ingvar had to try not to laugh out loud for pleasure, at times, seeing some of the truly ludicrous strikes, bleeding with force and speed, driven by arms that had no equal in the Chapter, save for Grimnar himself.

Chris Wright's trilogy is a great series that I adore and I really enjoy how distinct he makes the different warp abilities very unique and flavourful. We know from the Space Wolves codex that Rune Priests have the ability to summon the spirits of Fenris in battle but we so rarely get to see them in action and Wraight makes them a terrifying force to be reckoned with. It's also interesting to see how the Priests are able to empower their brothers while in combat.

In short Rune Priest doing cool Rune Priest shenanigans.

After the council of Terra meets and Rogal Dorn's proposed crusade of vengeance is outvoted by Guilliman and the High Lords beating out the Primarchs votes, Dorn calls for a secret meeting with two brothers to co-ordinate an effort to find evidence that will force Guilliman's hand:

He heard footfalls at the end of the corridor, and saw the Imperial Fists delegation coming around the corner. Three Huscarls, plus their master. They marched with purpose, and Dorn’s expression was back to how Corswain remembered it from before – focused, alive with purpose.

He bowed. ‘My Lord Dorn. The primarchs of the First and the Sixth await you within.’

Dorn nodded brusquely. ‘Seneschal,’ he said. ‘My thanks for this. It is good to see you here again.’

The heavy doors slid open, revealing a large circular chamber beyond. No furniture had been set across its old stone floor, though ancient weapons – a longsword, an axe, several obscure patterns of bolter – hung on chains in the shadowed recesses. Fires crackled in braziers, making the place look primordial, the site of compacts between warlords since the earliest days of the Unification Wars. And as far as Corswain knew, that was exactly what this place had always been – its allocation to the First Legion had always felt appropriate.

Inside were five Legion adjutants, two from the Dark Angels, three from the Wolves of Fenris. Bjorn was there, dragged back from his work on the Martian leaguer. They all went helmless but otherwise wore full ceremonial battle plate, with heavy cloaks and pelts draped over the fine ceramite.

Towering over even those venerable warriors were the two other primarchs. The Lord Russ was the most ebullient in appearance, his thick plate embossed with gold-chased runes and totems of his storm-racked home world. His long blond hair hung raggedly around his scarred face, and his gauntlet rested ponderously on the pommel of the immense blade Mjalnar. By contrast, the Lion was an almost shadowy figure, his armour more restrained, his demeanour more reserved. The sword he carried was a more refined creation, one whose origins went back to the Emperor’s hand, they said. The tales of these two brothers’ rivalry were told all across the Imperium, something that had been famous since the days of the Crusade and had only intensified since. You could imagine the friction between them just by looking at them – the Knight and the Barbarian, cooped up together in an Imperium that was already bursting at the seams with outsized egos. And yet something seemed to have changed – some understanding reached. The Lion’s blade had wounded Russ close to death, they said, during an encounter deep in the Palace vaults soon after their return. If that were true, though, then no trace remained now, either of the wound or the animus that had created it.

‘Rogal!’ Russ cried, coming to greet him with arms wide. He clapped his gauntlet heavily on his shoulders. ‘Had some sleep? It suits you. You have some colour in those pasty cheeks at last.’

The Lion nodded soberly as the doors to the chamber closed, sealing them all in. ‘He’s right. You don’t look quite so much like a cadaver now.’

Dorn didn’t engage in any of that – he never had done. ‘So we have decisions to make,’ he announced, before checking himself and looking around the chamber. ‘Is this place sensor-sealed?’

Corswain took a step forward. ‘Entirely secure, lord,’ he said. ‘All may speak freely.’

He stole a glance at Dorn as he withdrew again. This was a gathering of equals, in all important respects. If any of them had come into serious conflict with the others, it would have been hard to pick a winner. And yet, for all the trials both his own liege and Russ had endured, Dorn bore the scars of the war more deeply. Few of his own Legion would know as well as he how nightmarish Terra had been back then. Even Guilliman would not have seen the worst of it, but Corswain had, and so had Dorn. Something in the primarch’s eyes gave it away – a secret fraternity of horror, pushed down, suppressed, but ineradicable, always there, the mark of the Siege.

‘You both know what madness assails my brother,’ Dorn said. ‘I know you have spoken to him, just as I have. He’s as stubborn as ever. Immoveable. They praise his reason, but I see little of it. He’s obsessed.’

Russ gave him a shrewd look. ‘Maybe. Or perhaps he just knows more than we do.’

‘It’s not knowledge,’ Dorn replied. ‘It’s ships. Only the fleet gives him his power.’

‘But you know how he is,’ said the Lion. ‘He works fast – he did so on Macragge too. He keeps his secrets, too.’

‘Aye, just as it ever was. Roboute might be our father’s truest son.’

‘So you can complain about it,’ said Russ, ‘or you can do something. What is it to be?’

Dorn smiled coldly. ‘We’ve been busy. The complacency has spread, the lies have been told, and so we need proof – proof that the enemy still has the powers used during the war, proof that they are capable of using them again.’

‘And you have this,’ said the Lion.

‘I do. Squads were sent out across the Sol System, hunting for evidence. Now we have the first of it.’ As Dorn spoke, one of the Huscarls brought out a palm-sized caster and spun a hololith from it. ‘This is Neptune. And this is its satellite Laomedeia. The old colony founded there was destroyed during the Solar War, afterwards occupied by the enemy. We had no contact with it until the Thirteenth returned to drive out the remains. Once they did so, they moved on.’

Russ peered sceptically at the rotating orbs. ‘I see nothing.’

‘Because the site is hidden. Archamus, my envoy, reports that the moon is shrouded. Its appearance is a deception – it hides hundreds of enemy warriors, ships, a new physical installation of some kind, and they are rearming. This is no technical shroud, but a projection of sorcery.’ He paused there, no doubt to let that sink in. ‘Sorcery of the kind we suffered from before. It is real. They can still summon it.’

The Lion frowned. ‘Can this be proved?’ he asked.

‘Not easily from distance,’ Dorn replied. ‘I will make Archamus’ report available to you, and he demonstrates the implausibility of material explanation for the phenomenon. We’ve seen such tricks before, remember, and not just from the other side. But it won’t persuade the Council as it is – they’ll want something concrete. So we need to go there – expose it, destroy what they’re building, chronicle its extent.’

‘And use it to force Guilliman’s hand,’ said Russ.

‘He couldn’t ignore that,’ said Dorn. ‘Not here, so close to Terra. It’ll expose the delusion that we have time to waste.’

‘He’ll still fight you,’ said the Lion.

‘But he’s open to evidence, isn’t he?’ said Dorn, a wry smile breaking out. ‘And if he isn’t, then the Council will be.’

‘You really aren’t going to let this go, are you, brother?’ said Russ.

‘No, and neither should you,’ Dorn said. ‘I know your hearts. I know you thirst to restart the war. Our numbers are already being recovered, so it only needs a clear case, just one, and we can march again.’

‘But Luna–’

‘Luna be damned! Nothing remains on Luna that can harm us, nor here on Terra, nor on Mars. He delays because he desires the power to shape things. He wishes to build a fortress here and rewrite the Lex for his own purposes.’

‘You truly believe that?’ asked the Lion.

‘He’s already begun the work. No one works harder, or more swiftly – before you know it, you will turn around and no longer recognise the laws that bind you. The old treaties torn up, the old rules disapplied, because while our father remains silent, a single voice – his – must be heard. Mark my words – he’ll come after your Legions next.’

Russ snorted. ‘For what purpose?’

‘To cement his advantage – he already outnumbers us. This is about more than military strategy. This is about survival. The survival of the Astartes.’

The Lion glanced at Russ. An awkward silence fell.

‘My Legion is going nowhere,’ said Russ eventually. ‘Save to Mars, when the preparations are complete. That is determined now. If Luna is a paltry prize, then the Red Planet is not. You must see that, Rogal.’

‘Then let the Mechanicus take it back. Give them aid, give them support, but we have no business being there. We should be out into the void, burning after the ones who did this. Lorgar lives. Perturabo lives. Typhus and Erebus live. Can you truly stomach that? Does it not make your blood run hot to even think of it?’

‘We would have to carry the Council, and they have already ruled.’

‘Only because they are complacent. They have listened to the fools who urged caution, but show them the reality, show them corruption at work again, and the fear will return.’

The Lion looked intrigued. ‘I think they may have been in fear for long enough.’

‘Oh no, they ought to fear more. All of us ought to fear more. We are numb – we are in shock, casting around for what to feel, but we need to shake that off. We need to look back up into the terror, and remember how to fight it.’

‘Why come to us, though?’ asked the Lion, still sceptical. ‘This moon. You could destroy it yourself.’

‘I could. I could summon the Phalanx and tear it apart, and then they would say that I orchestrated it all, that I was so bloodthirsty that I constructed the whole thing to embarrass my brother. But three of us, all seeing the evidence with our own eyes, recording the picts and all willing to swear on it? No, they could not ignore that.’

‘You begin to sound a little paranoid, my brother,’ said the Lion.

Dorn laughed. ‘And you would know that, eh? You would understand that. So what were you doing in Ultramar when we were dying here? What did you discuss out there with the Angel and our new overlord? Is that what stays your hand now? Is that why you have no stomach for this fight?’

The Lion’s eyes darkened at that, and in an instant the mood changed. ‘We bled for the Imperium,’ he growled. ‘You have no idea what labour we undertook, how many worlds we burned. Were it not for us, do you think the Traitor would have acted as he did? Would the Ultramarines have been able to make their progress across a galaxy that had been conquered and now was poised to rise against them? The war was not only here, brother. Never forget it.’

For a moment, Corswain thought Dorn would indeed forget that, that he’d turn on his brother in anger. He looked fragile, despite everything, the surface health, like a vast dam under stress that was finally beginning to crack. His eyes were a little too bright, perhaps, his bearing just a fraction too intense.

Then he relented. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course you are right.’ He sighed, rubbed his hands through his thick hair. ‘Forgive me. The weariness does not lift. And, yes, I think on this too much. It goads me.’ He looked up at them again. ‘But it should goad us all. The shame of justice being undone. They have not been punished, and we do not race to do it, and I do not know why. So we must act, even if all others fail. Come with me. We achieve this thing, then reconvene the Council, then we march – we three, and whoever else has the stomach for the hunt. We overtake them all, one by one, and mark our armour with their faithless blood. Now is the time for vengeance. If we miss it, it will never come again.’

Corswain said nothing, only listened. Bjorn and the others had done the same, but he knew exactly what they hoped for. In the end, there was little deliberation. Perhaps they had all been looking for an excuse for this, and anything much would have served. But the spectre of the unnatural talents coming back, that added urgency. He still remembered how it had been on the Mountain, how the air had sung with madness, how the rocks rippled like water and the dead had marched beside the living. They knew it would come back. The only question was when.

Russ chuckled – a low, grating rumble from that huge chest. ‘I never much liked you before, brother,’ he said. ‘I find that I do now. What a world of wonder and strangeness.’

Dorn didn’t smile. ‘I need you,’ he said. ‘Both of you.’

‘Then I will come,’ said Russ. ‘I will come to cut their throats and heap the bodies – it will be a warm-up for the work on Mars.’

‘And I too,’ said the Lion. ‘Not because your words shame me, but because I sense the truth of them. Something is amiss here, and Roboute is hiding his purpose. I offer the Invincible Reason. Nothing will carry us there more swiftly.’

Dorn drew in a breath, then bowed deeply to both. As he rose again, there was real emotion in his expression – a momentary creasing of that hard flesh, a flicker of gratitude that transformed his scarred and icy countenance. Corswain wondered what he’d have done if things had gone the other way, and found himself glad that it hadn’t.

‘Together, then,’ Dorn said, with feeling. ‘The canker remains, but let this action be the start. The first step on the journey to cleanse it from the universe.’

This section of the book was one of my absolute favorites, getting to see Dorn, Russ and the Lion all interact together for the first time, the underlying tension of the other two missing the siege and the reversal of roles these brothers seem to have made in the aftermath.