Content warning: blood, gore, dehumanization, insects, cosmic horror
In the inner sanctum of the Cathedral-Ship of Saint Belacqua the Merciful, Inquisitor Mordane finished donning his vestments. A tightly buttoned black coat covered his torso, with long black trousers to match, while a wide-brimmed hat shaded his head. The entire outfit rattled with pins of merit and holy symbols, and a loaded mag-pistol was secured to its belt. Finishing the final adjustments, Mordane caught his reflection in the mirror. An avian face stared back, with two slitted eyes and a hooked beak on a head of wrinkled black skin. Everywhere past his ear-holes, his body was covered in blue plumage, which was shaded modestly by the high collar of his coat. He shook his head spasmodically, and his beaded necklace jangled against his chest.
Fifty three. His necklace had fifty three beads. One bead for each of the fifty three worlds he had brought out of the darkness of heresy and into the Hierarchy’s light. Some he had brought to heel with atomic fire, others with holy words, others with the subtlety of an assassin’s knife. He prayed this mission would give him a new bead to string on his necklace.
Above him, a speaker fitted into the ceiling activated. “We have arrived, your Grace,” came the voice of the Navigator. “The Hierarch be with you.”
“The Hierarch be with you,” Mordane replied, and made his exit.
Walking through the halls of the Cathedral-Ship, by marble pillars and vaulted arches, Mordane passed a stained glass window of the Hierarch in all His glory. A pitiless tentacled face wreathed in a silver halo stared out. Beneath it, golden armor shone, white wings resplendent on either side. The Hierarch held a burning blade in one hand, while His other hand was poised in a gesture of silent rebuke. Beneath His feet were the central words of the Faith: Purge the heretic. Destroy the traitor. Subjugate the alien. Mordane bowed as he walked by.
Minutes later, he found himself in his drop ship, the engines roaring and the cabin rattling. Outside one porthole window, Mordane could see it: Araneus Prime. Thick clouds of smog filled the skies, vast cities blanketed the surface, and the seas were choked with runoff and slime. Build great foundries out of the bones of mountains and light them with the fossils of the dead, read the Fifth Commandment. It was a lesson the people of this world had learned well. Mordane gleamed with pride.
On either side of him were his honor guard: two Exarchs in full power armor, gifts from the Hierarch’s gene-forges. Each of them stood eight feet tall, and despite the trembling of the drop ship, they were as implacable as statues. Drum-loaded chain guns hung over their backs.
Araneus Prime had once been a valued Mining World, its annual tithe of metals and ores bringing untold wealth to the Hierarchy. But thirty solar cycles ago, the miners had unearthed something foul and terrible within the crust of Araneus Prime. Since then, the planet’s industry had ground to a halt and its cities had descended into chaos. Reducing the world to a sphere of molten glass would be a trivial matter, but the wealth within its crust was too valuable. Whatever the threat was, Mordane’s mission was to eradicate it himself.
The drop ship hit the upper atmosphere, and the shaking grew more violent, forcing Mordane to wrap one taloned hand through a safety strap. The roaring engines grew louder as well, the drop ship trying to slow its descent. At first, the porthole showed an impenetrable soup of brown-black clouds, but eventually Mordane could see where they were bound: a great and lonely mountain at the center of a mining camp. As the ship approached it, Mordane saw details percolate into view, industrial vehicles and flat, broad buildings. The shaking came to an end and the ship settled onto the ground with a thud.
Exiting the ship was like walking onto a desolate moon. The air was cold and wet, and had a bitter, acidic smell. Sirens filled the air. All around them, Mordane saw pillars of smoke, smashed windows, looted storefronts, graffitied walls prophesying the End of Days, and corpses of half a dozen species lying unburied in the streets. Mordane turned away from the city and towards the lonely mountain. A great opening had been cut into the side, the deepest mine on the planet, where the unholy threat had been unearthed. Their goal lay there.
As the exarchs stomped off the drop ship and the door closed behind them with a pneumatic pop, Mordane heard a noise over the omnipresent drone of sirens. It was a voice.
“It’s the Hierarch’s Angels! We are saved!”
Before Mordane could identify the source of the call, more joined it. People began pouring out of their boarded-up homes, forming a growing crowd. As his eyes scanned the horde, Mordane saw enormous tusked mammalians, glowing fungi, lithe insects, and short amphibians, all dressed in rags. Mordane picked out their languages–the clicking tiles of Odo, the razor words of Zil-speak, the brutal shouts of the Gor tongue. It made him sick to hear the ungrateful masses speaking anything other than High Imperial.
The people swarmed Mordane and his retinue. Some pushed holy symbols towards him, invoking their faith. Others offered fistfuls of money, or else whatever valuables they had. All begged him for safety and salvation.
Mordane hiked up the hem of his trousers and ordered the Exarchs to guard him from the throng. The gene-soldiers shoved people into the mud, broke arms and shattered teeth. Slowly but surely, the trio approached the lonely mountain.
But then one member of the crowd managed to slip by, grasping the Inquisitor by the collar of his coat. Mordane noticed with a wave of repulsion that it was a Human, its filthy, pox-covered features contorted with sorrow and rage.
“Please, you must save us!” it yelled hoarsely. “Every night, cultists and monsters take more people below. They’re multiplying! Feeding on our dead! Please, you have to get reinforcements! This planet is infested with…”
Unable to withstand the creature’s braying any longer, Inquisitor Mordane drew his mag-pistol and put a bullet in its brain. It released his collar and fell to the ground. The crowd began scattering back to their hovels. Mordane sneered.
Not long thereafter, he found himself in the mineshaft. While the cold air outside had felt like a wet sheet wrapped around his torso, this felt like a dagger of ice was piercing his flesh. His breath frosted in the air, and the featherless skin of his head felt like it was being flayed. The Exarchs, if they felt the cold at all, did not react.
It was dark as well, the only illumination coming from the dying service lights, white like bone. Every sound echoed many times over, the walls wet and undulating like the throat of a giant. Mordane took the lead, the Exarchs stomping behind him.
It was hard to tell how long he had walked before he heard: a high, bleating noise, contorted by the cavern walls. A scream.
Mordane broke into a run, the Exarchs not far behind, taking one bounding step for every three of his. Mag pistol drawn, he charged down the mineshaft.
He found himself in a junction, dimly lit by sickly white facility lights. His senses were assaulted by the smell of blood and filth. At the center of the junction was the corpse of a Human, its chest cut open by a jagged blade. Standing over the creature’s body were three figures in hooded red robes. One held a curved sickle of volcanic glass, the implement slick with gore.
“Heretics!” Mordane cried, pointing a hooked claw. The Exarchs understood his implied command. Two heartbeats later, the three smoking corpses of the apostates, riddled with bullets, hit the floor. The deafening tattoo of the massive guns was dying, echo by echo, down to silence.
Mordane wasted no time in picking over the bodies. Each belonged to a different species, one with a long, crocodilian maw, one with a tentacled face slick with mucus, and one, the Inquisitor noticed numbly, with a beaked face like his own.
For the first time, one of the Exarchs spoke, his voice distorted by his helmet, coming out in a compressed wavepacket of booming static. “Shall we retreat and regroup, your Grace?” said the soldier. “We could bring more reinforcements to bear.”
Mordane would have agreed in a moment, but something still bothered him. He pried the sickle blade from the talons hands of his kindred. Years of Inquisitorial training ruminated in his mind.
Against the bubbling wave of sickness that protested in his craw, he turned towards the corpse of the Human. From where he crouched, it was obvious. The corpse had two wounds. One, clearly the fatal one, stretched jaggedly between its two earlobes and under its jaws. The other, however, was far cleaner, and pointed straightly from its collarbone to its pelvis, exposing the delicate organic machinery within. A phrase came unbidden to Mordane’;s mind: butchered. Like food would be.
A susurrating, slipstream noise came over the trio from deeper in the mineshaft. The Exarchs raised their chain guns, but Mordane stopped them with a wave. “Hide,” he commanded, and they obeyed.
Half a breath after they nestled themselves behind an inert generator, the light was split by a profane form the likes of which Mordane had never seen before. All carbuncle hackles and muscleless limbs, clad in carapace like an insect, blood-red and glistening, no eyes or sensory organs save a mouth of razor-sharp teeth, humanoid in its gait but hunched, dagger claws rapacious in their graspings, a long crest for a head, a spiked tail arching from its back. Big. Big as the Exarchs, and moving like them too. No, better. Like mercury in a vial. No energy wasted. Liquid and engineered and perfect. Its satin skin, hard like armor, purring as it moved.
“By the Hierarch what is it,” Mordane found himself saying as it lifted the bodies in its claws and retreated down the mineshaft.
It was quiet for an eternity. Mordane rose tremulously, and the Exarchs followed suit.
“Hierarch protect me from those who walk in the night,” he intoned over a holy symbol. “Hierarch protect me from those who stand against me on the field of battle. Hierarch protect me from those who preach against Your holy Word.”
The Exarchs reloaded their guns. “Reinforcements,” one of them intoned. “We need reinforcements.”
The Inquisitor did not meet his gaze. “No,” he said numbly, “not yet. I need to know what that thing is.” Again his gaze fell on the obsidian blade, slick with the Human’s blood. He rose. “And that means I need you both.”
The trio ran for a second, a minute, a thousand years. They saw no more cultists, nor any sign of the beast. The only sounds were Mordane praying. “…and Leontius begat Theocletian and Theocletian begat Tiberius and…” on and on he went.
Until at last, they reached the end of the mineshaft.
The rock was the first thing they noticed. While the rest of the mineshaft was scarred by the marks of tools, the teeth of drills and power axes, the path they now trod was smooth, formed by hydrochloric acid or some other process Mordane knew not.
The second thing they noticed was the noise. Thousands of purring tongueless voices, speaking in some language none of them could comprehend.
It was a vast hemispherical chamber, hundreds of meters across, into which the mineshaft was nothing more than a doorway along the base. Covering the walls and floors and ceiling were thousands of the beasts, crawling over one another like insects, the sound coming from the masticating scrape of chitin against chitin. And at the center of the room, standing over the uncountable brood, was a far larger beast. Ten meters of carapace, tall and red like a comet’s tail. It didn’t notice them, at first. No, it was doing something.
Feeding. Feasting on the bodies of the dead. Scattered scraps of red cloth, what once covered the cultists, slipping discarded out of its mandibles and onto the floor. Droplets of gore falling into the waiting, mewling maws of its brood.
It looked up at the Inquisitor’s retinue, and Mordane saw a vision in its form.
He saw an incarnadine cosmos, devouring itself over and over again. Forming and reforming. No single act of Creation, as his faith taught him. Just digestion and excretion, worlds upon worlds echoing themselves forever. And there, chewing the flesh of the autophagic universe, was a form beyond comprehension. A cancer that had been there for all of eternity, older than time. Older than sentience, yet deep and fathomless in its malice nonetheless.
“The Devourer,” he managed breathily. “It’s beautiful.”
Those were his final words.