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It had been some time, years, since Gadriel had walked the pavements of the Fortress of Hera. Time enough that he had become several other versions of himself, time enough that each step he took on the polished porphyry pavements felt like a doubled movement–himself now, and the young Scout he had last been here. The old buildings, and his old self, seemed like shadows overlaid under his vision. He almost expected to hear the slap of his Neophyte groxhide boots, instead of the heavy tread of his relic armor.
He was here with Captain Titus, to meet the Primarch returned. He could still barely imagine that it was real, their Primarch returned and he, worthy to meet him. In all his childish daydreams, he could not have imagined it.
Captain Titus was in a private conference with the Primarch now, and Gadriel was temporarily without duty–an almost unique experience for him. Decades, he had spent, with every minute accounted for in training, prayer, readiness. Now, with rank and age, he had ‘earned’, he guessed, some time, a blade no longer in need of such hard tempering.
The Primarch’s equerry had suggested that he find some way to ‘amuse himself’ for a few hours. The words sat ill in his ears, and sat even worse on his shoulders. Maybe it was the weight of years and wars that made them seem so strange, made this ‘free’ time feel so strange, so he’d decided to walk the halls he had known as a child, as an Aspirant, once again. Maybe things would all click into sense.
The Primarch’s presence had dazzled him, he thought. Not merely (merely) the miracle of his very experience, not just (just) the confluence of survival that had brought Gadriel before him–all his brothers who had once stood by his side, fallen in combat, lost in battle and honor, and he alone remaining to represent them all before their genefather. He had thought his hearts would stop from the magnitude of the moment.
Gadriel had grown up in Talassar, surrounded by images of the Primarch of Macragge, hair of bronze, of white gold, of every shade in between; chin set with sternness and command. But none could touch the reality of Guilliman’s presence: the sternness had alchemized into a sort of long-worn endurance; and there was a gentleness, almost a pride, in his eyes as he looked over the assembled panoply of the Second Company that Gadriel had never seen in any icon. He seemed to radiate something holy, or holiness itself, something forever ineffable to a lesser mind.
It was a great deal to contemplate, and his boots treading the familiar pavements of the fortress grounded his thoughts as he walked, down corridors of study rooms and classrooms, of armories scaled to neophytes still growing into their bodies.
And the training grounds themselves, looking almost exactly as they had when he had been here himself, learning to read the honors of an Ultramarine’s armor, learning the weapons and skills of a warrior as set out by their Primarch’s codex.
The training yard was familiar and his mind fed him memories of those long dead, who had joined with him, as an Aspirant, trained with him as a Neophyte, who had endured the long nights of pain after their surgeries, afraid to weep or make a sound, suffering in silence, surrounded by brothers who knew or soon would know the same suffering, and everyone afraid to reach out.
He would have done anything for a comforting hand, those nights, a soft word, any sort of gentle contact, that acknowledged his pain, saw him and did not think of him the lesser for it.
But he knew, now, in his Ancient’s armor, that the isolation was necessary, that the softness he had sought would have bent him to weakness and one of the lessons that pain can teach us is how much we can endure on our own.
We always think we are weak, until we have no choice but to be strong.
Gadriel stood on the observer’s parapet, as the sun of Macragge slid down rosy gold toward the horizon. Below him, neophytes were practicing advancing on a target, gun servitors armed with live, but low potency rounds, acting as their opfor. He recognized the pattern they were attempting, realized it was the wrong solution for that tactical set up, the whole thing in a split second, before one neophyte yelped, against his own will, as a servitor landed a direct hit on his armored chest.
Another broke his position and ran to the side of the first one, and Gadriel felt his hearts twist in his chest. A brother, a true brother, feels the wounds of his brother as his own, but an Ultramarine could not falter, even though his dearest heart-brother falls at his feet. To care, but not too much, that was the laminate blade they all had to learn to dance on, knowing that whichever step they took,the blade would leave scars.
A crack from off to the right: their preceptor firing a shot that took the second Neophyte square in the back. A punishment. A lesson.
An Apothecary strode to the fallen pair, as the exercise continued, firing at the gun servitor with one hand, with the easy aim and stride of a full Battle Brother. Every Neophyte must have felt stung at how easy he made it look, how sure his stride, how almost careless his aim as he laid down covering fire for himself.
Gadriel didn’t know why, perhaps just long training of his own that made it impossible to stand and watch, but he vaulted, easily, over the marble railing of the balustrade, landing behind a simulacrum building, drawing his own pistol to cover the Apothecary.
He saw the white helmet turn, just enough to spot him, acknowledge him, and then get to work, even as Gadriel advanced on him, kneeling over the two Neophytes in their light carapace armor.
So young, he thought. They hadn’t had the Black Carapace yet, but trying so hard. He saw one of them bit down on a scream when he caught sight of Gadriel’s ornate armor. Gadriel knelt over the second, tearing off the light armor with one hand, taking the younger man’s hand and placing it over the wound. “Pressure,” he ordered, so that the Neophyte could control his own bleeding until the Apothecary could find time for him.
The Neophyte gave a nervous swallowing nod, pressing his hand and then the other on top of it, over the wound. “‘M sorry,” he mumbled.
“Not as sorry as your Sergeant will make you be,” Gadriel said, with the weight of memory, but his voice was soft. There was enough in the young man’s future of suffering and pain. Gadriel did not need to add to it.
“And not half as sorry as you should be, Stelen.” The Apothecary loomed over the second Neophyte, working on him with hands still stained with the blood of the Neophyte’s friend. “Though you seem to have some luck to summon divine aid.” The helix on his helm inclined toward Gadriel. “For all the good it will do you.”
The battle, the mock battle, thundered around them for a few more minutes, before being called to end. From what Gadriel had seen, they had achieved their objective, even with the wrong strategy, but at a higher cost, in ammunition, in time, and in blood. The ragged crew rounded themselves up, heading back to the starting objective, on an intersecting course with their preceptor. Who would be harsh on them, Gadriel knew, but it was better his harsh words than the harsher lessons of combat.
“Can you carry him?” The Apothecary rose, scooping up the first. Gadriel nodded, the Neophyte’s weight less than a heavy bolter in his hands as he turned to follow the Apothecary back to his training field ward.
“I’m sorry,” the Neophyte, Stelen, said, again.
“You made a choice. It was the wrong choice. It is better to make these mistakes here in practice, rather than war.”
“That’s what Sergeant Karanian says,” Stelen said, weakly.
“He is correct.” Even if Gadriel had disagreed, he would not have said so in front of a Neophyte. A uniform front must be created at all times for the young, for discipline. For stability.
“But,” Stelen said, chin dropping to his chest, picking up a red stamp from the blood soaked through his shirt, “I just wanted to see if he was all right.”
“I understand.” He did. Truly he did. Gadriel could remember dozens of battles where he had had to force his eyes forward, his hands steady, as he heard a brother of his cry out in pain and surprise. “We honor our wounded not by thinking them weak, but by pushing for victory in their name.”
“I was just–” the Neophyte cut himself off abruptly, his hand knotting on top of the wound in his chest.
“Afraid,” Gadriel finished, to the Neophyte’s miserable nod.
“I thought.” Stelen’s mouth worked for a moment. “I keep thinking that at some point, the fear will go away. ‘And they shall know no fear’. But I do.”
“Not for yourself,” Gadriel corrected. He stepped over the boundary of the training grounds, laying the Neophyte on the medical slab that the Apothecary pointed him to. It might seem a small difference, but just like in angles of fire, even the smallest change was significant downrange.
“No,” Stelen said, trying for a moment to struggle to sit up, before his body told him the better part of staying conscious was laying down, looking up at the now-bloodstained relic armor, the stern face above him. A hero, scarred from battle, talking to him about such things without contempt, with something like understanding.
Gadriel straightened. “Without fear, we could not have courage, for what is courage but standing your ground when fear tells you to run. What is courage but doing what must be done when fear whispers to you of living, and losing what you love. Fear is the shadow against which courage shines as light.” He thought of Chairon, abruptly, and realized he had been avoiding thinking about Chairon for weeks now, since he heard, since he had pulled up the archives on Trygge and read the battle reports for himself, as though committing every word to memory would somehow keep Chairon alive, or keep him company in death.
He knew how Chairon must have felt, hearing the heavy doors close and seal behind him, hearing the roar of the genestealer swarms ahead of him, knowing that this place, or a step or two forward, would be where the long story of his life wrote its final words, with no one to read them.
I read what I could, he told himself, as if it was enough. As if it could ever be enough. He swallowed, hard, around a sudden lump of grief in his throat, his voice cracking as he forced himself to speak, suddenly aware that the Apothecary, and the other Neophyte, were listening. "Without fear," he swallowed again, as though the word was a stone in his throat, "we would have nothing to impel us forward, to improve. For what keeps us going in battle but the fear, not of our own deaths, but the death of our honor, of letting down our brothers." His eyes lifted, meeting the red lenses of the Apothecary's helmet, seeing, somehow, understanding beneath the red glassaic.
He had wanted, so many times, on hearing about the deaths of his brothers, seeing their mauled, too-still bodies, hearing their agonal gasps on vox, to collapse to his knees, to surrender to the crushing weight of loss, but he had forced himself upright each time, the burden a little heavier, another name, another memory, for him to safeguard into the future. "Fear is like fire." He nodded, the image coming to him and he knew it was right, he felt the rightness of it. "You can sit in middle of it and let it consume you, or you can use it to move forward, like a rocket thruster." He laid his hand, heavy and armored, over the Neophyte's. "Use it to move forward. Always. Make that your pledge."
Tears glittered in the Neophyte's eyes, not of pain or shame, but understanding, an understanding so deep that Gadriel thought that perhaps the young Scout was crying for him, shedding the tears that the weight of his years and rank forbid him to shed.