Frei's gaze swept across the newly lit-up emblems. Beyond them, carved into the walls of the chamber, were stone reliefs. They depicted familiar events in an angular, stylized fashion. On one frieze there were pyramids within a city, the exact dimensions of those on Gangava. The Gothammar arriving in orbit was on another. The reinforcements from Fenris translating in-system, the destruction of the void-shield generator, all the events were there.
This has been foreseen.
Rangr kept is chainsword poised in the attack position. Like all the Wolves in the chamber, he was on high alert, his hackles high and his hearts beating solidly.'What is the meaning of those emblems, Lord?' The Wolf Guard asked. 'They're Fenryka, but no Great Companies that I know.'
Ironhelm began to move away from the platform, lumbering down the steps heavily. Like his troops, he kept his frostblade activated. The worst of the nausea subsided, to be replaced by the cold hand of dread. 'They are cousins,' he growled, his voice shot through with loathing. 'The Wolf Brothers. The lost ones.' Frei joined the Great Wolf, and the pair of them descended the last steps from the pyramid quickly. the retinue followed in their wake.
'The Brothers have been disbanded for over two hundred years,' said Frei. 'I do not understand-'
'So you have already said, Rune Priest,' snarled Ironhelm, losing patience. All his fury, all his kill-urge, had been suddenly blunted, and the result was an almost physical pain. 'Enough uncerrtainty. This place is a mockery of us. We will return to the fleet and destroy it from orbit.'
As he neared the far side of the chamber, close to where a gilded archway marked the exit out to the halls beyond, the braziers suddenly changed colour. From blazing sapphire they sitched to a sickly green, intense and overbearing. The Wolf Brothers emblems became distorted and grotesque in the shifting light. With the sharp sound of metal grating against metal, massive blast doors withdrew from the walls of the chamber, In every direction, huge vaults opened up, each of them bleeding more emerald sickness into the central chamber. Dark shapes emerged from the fog of green, twisted and diseased. They were Space Marine in profile, but horribly altered.
Some had trailing tentacles in place of limbs, others had misshapen heads crowned with thorns. Their armour was warped and uprooted, the plate ripped by growths from below and fused with unholy flesh where it spilled into the open. Helm-lenses glowed with more sickly witchlight, piercing even the shifting miasma roiling from the vaults, They didn't march cleanly, but limped, dragged or scuttled, hauling their broken bodies into the open, tottering on cloven hooves and clawed crow's feet.
As they emerged into the light of the braziers, their origins became clearer. Their battle-plate had once been grey, adorned with the totems and fetiches of th ehunt. There were pelts still clinging to the corupted ceramite, as botched and altered as the armour beneath. Images of fangs and runes were still graven into breastplates and greaves, though stretched into new blasphemous patterns by some dark and subtle artistry. as they lumbered into view, the mutated warriors began to howl in a mockery of the battle cries they had once roared so proudly. The sound was horrific, a chorus of fluted misery and distortion that resounded from the high walls around them and filled the chamber with perverted hatred.
'The bane of the Wolves', breathed Frei, finally understanding. 'Not him. Not us. Them.'
Rangr and the other Wolf Guard hesitated. Normally they'd have rushed into combat at the first sight of such corruption, but this time none of them moved. they could all see the runes on the armour, the withered pelts and the beast-mask helms. They all knew, without needing to be told, that the gene-seed in each one of those horrors was the same as the helix that animated them.
'Orders, lord?' asked Frei, seizing his staff in both hands, as riven by indecision as those about him.
Ironhelm raised himself to his full, terrible height then, watching the oncoming mutants with agrim horror. they were brothers in more than name. They were the only successors the Space Wolves had ever permitted to be made, the only other scions of the primarch Leman Russ that remained in the galaxy. They shared blood. They shared gene-memory. They shared everything.
'Remember yourself, priest,' Ironhelm growled, picking out the first of his targets from the hundreds that presented themselves.
'These are no longer Wolf Brothers. Kill them. Kill them all, and do not cease until their abomination has been cleansed from the universe forever.'
Extract from 'Batlle of The Fang' by Chris Wraight
