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Variel managed to cause an absolute ruckus of sound, as he pushed his way into the eyrie of the Bleeding Eyes, almost as though his scowl had volume to it and was screaming. Or the flayed faces on his armor were screaming.
But when he spoke, his voice was that preternatural quiet that always signalled danger. “Lucoryphus. A word.”
Lucoryphus glide hopped down to the ground, safely, he figured, out of Variel’s range. “You are displeased.” When was the Apothecary ever actually pleased, though? He could not remember. However, his memory was no longer what it used to be. There might have been one rare moment of satisfaction. Perhaps when Variel had found the Navigator.
“You.” Variel spoke as though each word was a weapon, a grenade he wanted to launch at the Raptor. “Gave. Him. Glucose.”
Not a question of who ‘him’ was. Decimus, of course. And Lucoryphus had given him glucose--some sort of candy he had gotten from the serfs. “It is food.”
Variel scrubbed a hand over his pale face. “I have his diet nutritionally optimized for his growth and brain development. Your extraneous rations throw all my calculations off.”
Lucoryphus rose on his toes. “It was a piece of candy.”
“It was not in his chart!”
“Things happen to us that are not in your charts, Apothecary.” This was stupid. An argument over a smaller-than-palm-sized bit of sugar.
Variel just stared at him, eyes flat and hostile and strange: the pale eyes of a Corsair, not a true son of Nostramo.
“I wouldn’t have needed to comfort him if you weren’t always yelling at him.” That was the truth: Variel’s exacting nature was a plasteel wall that all of them ran into from time to time, but Decimus got a larger dose, with everything from his nutrition to his sleep schedule to his learning time carefully logged and analyzed.
“Comforting him makes him soft.”
“He is a child. He’s allowed to be.”
“Softness is weakness.”
Lucoryphus dropped down to all fours, stalking around Variel, just to make him have to decide to turn or not. “Hardness means brittleness. We do not want to forge a weapon that will shatter at first use.”
“He will not.” Variel would make sure of it.
“If you think one piece of candy is enough to ruin him, you have no faith in his strength.”
“I have no faith in you.”
Lucoryphus gave a shrug, shifting the flight engine on his back. “And yet I persist.” Goading Variel was not his favorite hobby, but it was on the list. But he relented, if only to end this stupid conversation. “He is the future of our Legion and our legacy. You act as though I don’t know or value that.” That was the real core of the issue. “But even you had some fond memories of childhood.” He did, even after all these centuries, though they were blurred with time. He remembered, if dimly, joy and comfort. “Allow him his.”
One memory, chewing his way through the sticky caramel, clinging to his small, round fists, as Lucoryphus’s corpse-like face nodded over him. A small enough moment of pleasure.
Variel growled, but his words had failed him. “It is on your head, then.” He waited, a beat, as though daring Lucoryphus to retort, and then turned on his heel, stalking out of the chamber.
***
“And this.” Lucoryphys pointed at the word written on the pict screen. They were up to ten words today, for Decimus to sound out, and read. Lucoryphus’s claw tapped beneath each character, as Decimus slowly worked through the word. Nostraman was a difficult language, and in a rare moment of agreement, both Variel and he had agreed that the child should learn the ancient tongue of the Legion. “Now use it in a sentence.”
Decimus started in one of those pidgin cants, before Lucoryphus chided him. “Nostraman only.”
Decimus screwed up his face and came out with a halting sentence, stumbling over the dative case ending. But he did it, looking up for Lucoryphus’s approving nod.
Lucoryphus handed over a small pistol, a human sized bolt pistol, even that large in the little boy’s hands, and made a shrill shriek which was followed by a loud burr of engines and movement, as the rest of the Eyes spiraled down from the rafter beams.
He handed out pict screens to each of them, one of the studied words on each, and signaled them to take flight.
“I call out a word. You shoot the one who carries it.”
“But!” Decimus looked appalled at the pistol in his chubby hands.
“If they can get injured by such a weak caliber…” Lucoryphus said, wryly. At most it would chip some armor. Provided Decimus could actually hit them as they wheeled around above him This was perfect, Lucoryphus thought. He drilled the child in Nostraman, he drilled the child with marksmanship, and his Raptors got evasion flight practice.
Decimus nodded, uncertain, but willing, as ever, to follow Lucoryphus’s lead.
“Good.” Lucoryphus had to stop himself from patting the boy’s small head with his armored, filthy claw. “Let us begin.”
***
Decimus sat on the edge of the medicae slab in the Apothecarion. This place was familiar to him, for years before–as an infant, all the medical checks he had had. As a small child, watching the Apothecary do his gruesome work while he clutched some of the instruments like toys, learning their names and uses as he handed them over, delighted just to help.
And now, he was here, ready for the first of many surgeries that would transcend him, that would turn him from a baseline into an Astartes, into a Night Lord, like Lucoryphus, like Variel.
He knew better than to talk: he’d seen Variel slice off limbs of those who argued with him, or even who cried out too deeply in pain. He would not.
But he knew he was on a threshold, a doorway to becoming and he could not stop the vibrating eagerness in his body, as Variel entered the Apothecarion, a leather apron over his armor, stained with ancient blood. It reminded Decimus of the times he had sat, watching Variel flay bodies, learning the angle at which to hold the blade, the right tension to put on the skin to lift it from the fascia beneath.
Variel’s pale eyes regarded him.
“It will hurt.”
“I will endure it.” Decimus was ready. Or as ready as he could make himself. He had followed all of the rites he had been directed to. He had even spoken with Malcharion.
“It will hurt beyond that, as your body adjusts.”
“As you have endured, I shall as well, or be rightfully cast as failure.” This was what Decimus had learned. To break under pain was failure, weakness.
Variel gave a nod, as though this impromptu catechism had been intended all along, “You cannot fail,” he said, like a challenge. He did not have the dubious gift of foresight, but Decimus was the lynchpin between the past and the future, the moment legacy meets life.
“I will not,” Decimus said, and then hopped off the table, wrapping his arms around Variel’s waist, like the child he was, the child he was saying farewell to. The skin apron felt cold on his face, the old blood copper sharp and stinking, but it was Variel, who had checked on him, kept him close, kept him clean and cared for. He would not let Variel down.
The Apothecary went rigid, as though flash frozen, at the embrace, before slowly, mechanically, lowering his arms down to awkwardly rest on Decimus’s shoulders. “See that you don’t,” he said, with a little less of the coldness Decimus was used to.
***
Decimus tried to shift his weight under Variel’s cold eyes.
“Stop moving.” Variel never said that sort of thing without it being a warning, and Decimus felt the icy edge of a razor against his scalp, trimming down the hair on the nape of his neck.
“I don’t know why you have to do this.” Lucoryphus, crouched on a table across the way, elbows resting on his knees, his too long arms dangling their claws in empty air.
“He needs to appear masterful,” Variel said as though having to explain himself was physically painful.
“Our Primarch did not.”
“Our Primarch.” That was all Variel said, the words a gulf between them. He was not from Nostramo. He had never met Curze, for all that he was a Night Lord in deed and act and armor.
“He is skilled,” Lucoryphus re-began. “Ability has always weighed more than looks.”
“You should hope so,” Variel said, dryly. The Raptor’s face, like a half-rotted corpse, the teeth black rimmed against the gums, splotched with lividity.
“Hope,” Lucoryphus countered, as though the word itself was a joke. It was a concept alien to either of them, save for the Scout sitting between them, the scars of his surgeries still welted and raw on his body. He was their hope.
“He is young. He needs every advantage we can give him.”
“Including a haircut.”
Variel didn’t answer for a long moment, drawing the razor up the back of the head, lifting pressure toward the top. “Yes.” Any advantage of power, or psychology, that he could use to install Decimus where he needed to be, for the Aeldari prophecy, for the future of the Legion, he would do. He would do much more, and much worse, than tidying someone’s hair.
***
“Your name.” Variel loomed over the new captive, letting the reek from his armor, the blood spattered on his leathers, tell their thousand words tales.
“Raxus.” The other spat as he spoke, blood and something black like ash hitting the decking.
“Your assignment.”
A glare, that bordered on insolence, before the Red Corsair captive grew something like a sense of self-preservation. “Delta.”
Variel nodded. It would suffice.
“You filthy cur,” Raxus snarled, emboldened by the questions. “You betrayed us. You betrayed Lord Huron.”
“Betrayal is,” Variel said, mildly, “often a matter of perspective.” He had expected this, especially when the Bleeding Eyes had proposed this raid on the Eye. But they needed a psyker. They needed a Librarian.
“And this is your chance,” Variel added, after a moment. “An honorable, if agonizing, death is an option, should you choose it.”
He knew Raxus wouldn’t. None of them would. “What do you want from me, then, betrayer.”
“Your skills.” Obviously.
“Only one born to the Librarius can wield its knowledge.”
Variel snorted. Of all the things he might have ever envied, the skills of a psyker were never on that list. “You had better hope that is not true.”
Raxus snorted, fighting against the manacles on his wrists. “You have none of your own.”
“Keep talking,” Variel said, his voice that too-mild that was a warning. “And we shall see how much of your body is optional to the task before you.”
***
Decimus never spoke of his gift to Variel, or Lucoryphus. He had known, even when the visions had started, under the tutelage of Raxus, that such knowledge was to be used as a wedge, as power, to force someone’s hand.
He would never do that to the two who had raised him. It was enough that they knew his gift, and knew he had likely foreseen their deaths as he had so many others. They were not special in that way.
But he had not forgotten, and the visions never left him, how and when the two who had been closest to him his entire life, would die.
Neither would die an easy death. Neither would succumb without pain and rage.
But neither would just fall, collapsing into the weakness they had fought their whole lives.
So he said nothing, all these years.
And still.
And still, Variel knew.
Variel looked up from his medical auspex, as Decimus entered. Decimus wore the rank of Captain now, his authority unquestioned, and with enough years of predicted and followed through victories sustaining his rank. But Variel knew this was nothing of command between them.
His sandy-colored hair had become stippled with grey over the centuries, while Decimus’s was still the black of youth, and lines, not of laughter but of scowls and concentration, had carved themselves deep channels on his face. Only his eyes were the same, light blue, the color of a sky neither of them had ever seen, piercing and intent.
And he knew.
He laid the auspex aside, as though discarding it. “It is today, then.”
Decimus nodded. “It is today.” Death comes from Variel; death who had been stalking the Apothecary’s heels for decades, sometimes sinking its teeth into his flesh, but never, quite, managing the task.
Except today.
"Yes," Decimus said, repeating himself, affirming it, and he heard his own voice crack. He had seen it for months, stronger and stronger, in the way that the visions that would not be altered blinded him.
Variel offered a wan smile, pressing his hands together as though to limber up for surgery. There was no fear in his voice. If anything, a sense of relief. "I have no regrets." Nothing undone he wanted to do. Nothing unseen he had hoped to live to see. Would he have liked to see the final vindication of the Night Lords? Yes. But this was enough.
If he had one regret, or even the kernel of one, it was that he would die before the Raptor. But perhaps it was just as well. HIs work was done, and Lucoryphus would carry it forward at least a few more steps into the future.
"Variel." He had always forsworn names, refusing to let Decimus call him Brother, or Apothecary, or, the one time he had used the Nostraman word for 'sire'. He was always just...Variel. Ice cold and sharp as a scalpel, but there, always.
Variel said nothing, because no words came. He was never an orator, and he had no idea where Decimus's skill with words came from. Not him, and he doubted they came from Lucoryphus. Talos, perhaps, though more sure than Talos, his geneseed speaking through his inheritance.
But even his skill seemed to falter, at least for a moment, before Decimus finally found some words. "I would not be who I am without you." A simple sentiment, trite, even, and part of Variel, the part that refused to let any weapons strike to deep, wanted to push back with a gibe.
Variel found he could not, and something strange seemed to sting his eyes, like a corrosive, his hearts feeling heavy and yet light in his cage of ribs.
And this time, when Decimus stepped forward, his arms pulling Variel against him, he didn't fight it, his own arms clinging to the other's armor, face to face and eye to eye this time. "I will not fail you," Decimus whispered, a repetition of the last time this had happened, but even more sure, more intent. "I will make you both proud."
"All," Variel corrected, all, not both: as though he had a moment of Talos's affliction, as though he could see the ghosts of the First Claw crowding around them. Perhaps that is what happened when the warp thinned to welcome you. And not just them, but the Legion around them, their renown, the hope they dared to kindle after centuries, a weak but bright flame. And he knew he and the Raptor had just been the last hands to carry on the legacy that the others had picked up, a sacred duty, discharged to the last moment.
He did not know pride. Did not even know if such a thing was real, or allowed for his kind, crushed under years of torment, years of pain afflicted and endured. And he hated being touched. But he held Decimus against him, for a few scant seconds, and whatever he felt, it cleared his mind of any doubt. It was time for Decimus to step out from their shadows, to stand on his own, strong, able feet. He and Lucoryphus had done all they could. And it was...enough.
Variel released the embrace, turning to his weapons locker to pull out his narthecium. He was ready.