The Gift of Hope
Commissar Kalun Dresk paced his cell. He had been
relieved of his black greatcoat, his peaked cap and bolt
pistol. Still, he was confident that his upright bearing
and steely gaze marked him out for what he was to
even the densest of troopers.
Not that any were there to weather that gaze now.
They had left to muster for the ritual nearly an hour
earlier, and had told him as much before they went.
They had sounded almost apologetic. It was as though
they hoped to explain some dereliction of duty to him,
perhaps to gain his blessing. If the situation hadn’t
been so dire, Dresk might have chuckled grimly at the
thought. Instead, he checked his wrist chron.
Minutes until it began.
He paced his cell again, wracking his brains, but he
could see no way to avert what was coming.
‘God-Emperor, forgive my failure,’ he said into
the silence.
Not silence. Not really. Not ever, anymore. Not since
the monsters came. Even now he could hear their
distant shrieks and howls, their cackling laughter and
awful promises carried on the furnace-hot winds. He
crossed to the iron barred window and looked down
from the Commandant’s Fortress. He gazed over the
ramparts of the curtain wall to where the unclean
legions swirled like a nightmare tide. Guns boomed
and cracked, raining fire upon the besieging entities.
Explosions rose in their midst, illuminating brass-
bound siege towers and obscene monsters of metal
and fire as they stalked towards the walls.
‘At least they’ve still got soldiers on the battlements,’
Dresk said to himself. ‘At least we’re still fighting.’
But for how much longer?
Dresk shook his head. He knelt, formed his hands into
the sign of the aquila over his breast, and began to
speak in earnest. None would hear his confession but
him on Terra.
As it should be.
‘God-Emperor, forgive me. I tried to make them
see,’ Dresk began. He faltered for a moment as some
ghastly being beyond the walls sent up an especially
loud wail, then he pressed on regardless. There might
not be much time.
By Andy Clark
‘It was the deadlock,’ he said to the air. ‘The
grinding, bloody attrition of it, spreading feelings of
hopelessness and despair. And the isolation. After the
darkness came there were many who feared we were
cut off, even that Holy Terra itself might have fallen.
I shot several for just such faithless utterances, yet
still the whispers persisted. Then… they came. The
heralds of Chaos… the…’ he couldn’t bring himself
to utter the word out loud, even now.
It was not a lack of strength or resolve, nor fear that
stilled Dresk’s wavering tongue. It was revulsion.
He would not sully the air by giving voice to their
unholy truth.
‘They came and the war began. We fought, oh
God-Emperor I pray that it made you smile to look
down upon us and see how we fought!’ Dresk felt
a stab of fierce pride at the memory of indomitable
human spirit, holding firm in the face of horrors
straight from the pages of scripture. He felt his face
fall into a scowl as he remembered again the losses,
the defeats, the slow retreat despite all they had done.
‘Then, hopeless deadlock,’ he said, and let out a long,
slow breath.
His chron ticked.
Dresk felt a stirring, as though the air was thickening,
becoming charged.
The ritual must have begun. He had little time to
make his peace.
‘The fighting dragged on for cycle after cycle, turning
after turning,’ he said. ‘We of stout heart fought
on regardless, but the mutterings grew worse. The
Astropaths couldn’t call out to the Imperium for help,
it was said. Soldiers whispered that the warp raged.
We are abandoned, they said. Some now openly
claimed that we were doomed, and not all of their
voices could be stilled. Then came the manifestations,
spreading through our ranks like a plague. Mutation
and madness were bad enough, and my bolt pistol
sang its hymns of obedience almost as often as the
regimental priests. Worse were the witches. How
could so many appear, in such a short time? Was it
the… beings… beyond the walls? Did they do this
to us? Honest, Emperor-fearing men and women
manifesting unholy powers as though from nowhere.
Never mind that they gave us the edge in battle more
than once, it was heresy, and I was forced to punish it
as such, over and over again.’
He heard a bell toll. Its basso boom rolled along
the fortress’ corridors, sounding somehow warped
out of truth. It left him with tinnitus in his ears that
did not fade, while around him the room seemed
somehow brighter.
Dresk’s frown deepened.
Was this it?
He closed his eyes and spoke on, rushed words
tumbling over one another in his haste to get
them out.
‘When the alarms sounded that day, God-Emperor,
I ran with pistol and blade in hand and my warriors
at my back, for I truly believed that the foe had
breached the walls. Instead, I found the xenos, already
surrounded by staring soldiery and half the fortress’
senior command. Where they had come from none
could say, but they spoke High Gothic with remarkable
clarity, and they claimed to approach under a flag of
parlay. Slender, overly tall and wholly alien, they wore
strange masks that seemed to shift when you stared at
them too long, and clinging black and white bodysuits
of some heretical composition. God-Emperor, I would
have struck them down then and there and gone
back to the walls, but the Commandant… he listened
to the xenos. He entertained their lies. They spoke
of a common foe in Chaos, and of how the strange
psychic malaise spreading through our ranks could
be harnessed, with their aid of course, to focus the
projections of our Astropaths and drive a message
through the turbulent warp. They spoke of it as a Tech-
Priest might strengthen the signal of a faulty vox-set.
They offered us a crystal of great size and said they
would teach us the ritual of its activation. They told us
it would focus our… energies… and allow us to cry for
aid. They offered us hope.’
The tinnitus whine was growing louder. Dresk winced
at the sound and worked his jaw in the hope of shifting
it, but it persisted. So did the impression of swelling
light, illuminating his cell as though a flare had been
struck within it. He rose and pressed fingertips to his
philtrum. They came away bloody.
This had to be it. Dresk had warned that the xenos
couldn’t be trusted, had even drawn his pistol and
tried to shoot one of the masked interlopers in the
hopes of provoking honest confrontation. He had
wished to save his superiors from damnation by
forcing their hand but, before he could take his shot,
he had found himself lost amidst a prismatic maze of
illusion that left his senses reeling. The next thing had
been a laspistol butt to the temple.
He had woken in this cell.
‘They wanted hope,’ he croaked, now tasting blood and
hearing the whine rise into a thin wail of pain. ‘Hope
I could not give them, not I nor their priests. They
wanted to feel powerful in the face of such horrors,
and the xenos used that. Used them.’
The wail had become a scream, not of one voice but
of many, hundreds, a chorus of the damned invading
his mind and intertwining with the sawing crystal
note that continued to rise and rise. For an instant,
Dresk saw as though through the eyes of another. He
was assailed by flickering images of figures wreathed
in white fire that poured from their eyes and mouths,
flowing into a shuddering crystal that glowed brighter
than a star. That light would annihilate them all, he
realised. Them. The Daemons. Everyone.
Everyone except the xenos, who had vanished again
as suddenly as they had come after they had imparted
their gift.
‘God-Emperor, forgive me,’ gasped Dresk, as he
watched waves of white fire roll out from the fortress’
walls to scour the Daemons from the land. As he saw
that same fire dance before his lips and spill along his
limbs like a corona.
‘God… Emperor…’ he forced the words out as
unfettered psychic energy poured through him,
burning him out from within as surely as it must every
other living being in the fortress. The screams filled
his mind until he felt it must surely burst like a sack of
wet meat. The fire burned through his flesh, his bones,
his soul.
The Imperium would hear their message, he realised
as he burned, as white psychic fire washed everything
else away and unbearable agony tore through every
fibre of his body.
Just as the xenos had intended all along.
The Imperium would hear one final cacophony of
screams from this damned world. Behind it, faint but
inescapable, they would hear the mocking laughter
that Dresk heard in his mind even now. The laughter
of the xenos who had slain them all.