Flicker. Time shifts.
He sees as he once saw – with his birthsight – and he wishes he did not.
This is a place of carnage, a slaughterhouse where dissected bodies have been hung from the walls, and skulls jangle on hooks like bone totems of primitive savages. Banners of black canvas ripple with no wind to stir them, as though the loathsome devices worked into their fabric quiver with life of their own.
A battle has been fought here. Or will be fought here. It was or will be a battle like no other, and its outcome has yet to be understood by the cosmos at large. This moment, this epochal paradigm shift in the affairs of the galaxy, is his alone to see, but soon it will echo through the aeons like the ringing of the mightiest bell ever tolled.
This is history being written before him, and history demands to be witnessed.
Bodies are strewn around him, titanic warriors in warplate scored with sword and axe wounds, punctured by missile impacts and ripped open by the claws of savage monsters. The ruin of flesh is unimaginable: meat and bone reduced to a gruel of marrow, bodies twisted and gnawed like cast-off butcher scraps. Kai is used to death, and knows full well the horrors man is capable of wreaking on his brothers, but this is something else.
This butchery has all the hallmarks of hatred, and no hate is as bitter as that which was once love. These warriors knew each other, and what was waged in this red chamber was not war, it was murder. It was fratricide of the worst and most unforgivable kind.
His gaze roams the corpses, drawn towards the focal point of the struggle, a stepped dais where a horror like no other awaits him. He wants to look away, to spare himself the awful certitude that will come with seeing what has happened upon the dais. His survival instinct begs him to look away, knowing he will be driven to madness by the sight of it.
Kai knows that to shirk this vision is cowardice. Yet he fears this understanding. He fears it will open a door that cannot ever be closed. Once knowledge moves from potential to actuality, there can be no unlearning, no undoing and no return to the life he once lived.
Flicker. Time shifts again…
Shapes and shadows move around him, vast, cosmic things without shape or form. They are invisible, but he knows they are there. He can sense their horror and disbelief at what has happened here, their galactic rage at an outcome none of them had foreseen. Time skips around him, droplets of blood reversing their course in the air to return to the split arteries from which they fell. Shouts of protest, cries of pain and booming laughter echo and return, echo and return, roosting in the throats of those that wrought them. In an instant, the horror upon the dais is undone and he sees fragments of what has gone before.
Black and red entwined, a golden eye, slitted like a cats. Ivory pinions, a boom of air and a clash of swords. Halo and thorny crown clash, a beating of breasts. Luminous and wondrous rears above hard-edged plate and monstrous ambition. They are clawed and enraged. A stalemate of blows, a battle of wills fought in realms beyond the understanding of mortal senses.
It is martial perfection unmatched. Only one battle in the history of the galaxy will ever eclipse its fury, and it will be fought in the same place in a matter of moments. That one such battle should take place is remarkable. Two is unheard of.
There are no forms he can see, only light and darkness, fleeting impressions of battling titans. These warriors are avatars, numinous and filled with the light of creation at the heart of the universe. Moulded into ideally-wrought mortal forms and unleashed upon the galaxy, they are brightly burning stars, all the brighter for their achingly short existence.
Voices take shape, but Kai is relieved beyond imagining that he cannot understand them, for who would dare listen to the words of gods? These incredible beings come together once more, and though their language is unknown to him, meaning seeps into his consciousness.
Gods may be beyond understanding, but theywill be heard.
Promises are made. Offers of power and servitude. Seductive bargains offered as promises. Angelic scorn is poured upon them. Hurt tears of rage and rejection. Bloody tears on golden features, a necessary death, the most infinitesimal crack in the most impenetrable armour. A life given willingly, a sacrifice on the altar of the future.
A death for a death. One to provoke the other…
Black and crimson collide one last time. An explosion of red light swamps Kai and time skips back and forth once again. Is this the future or the past? He sees this place as it must once have looked: the sterile, functional interior of a warship’s strategium. Breaths of recycled air stir freshly-won honour banners, liveried crewmen attend to their duties with pride, and the limitless potential of the galaxy is a spray of stars in the viewing bay.
In a heartbeat it changes, now a temple to a living god.
A dark-armoured god whose divinity was wrought by his own hands. Once the favoured avatar of a greater god, but now slipped from any notion of servitude, even to those who elevated him beyond the limits set upon his superhuman existence. This is a god who forges his own destiny with brute strength and implacable will, moulding the future to a shape pleasing to him and him alone. He calls no man master, but he will at the end.
Flicker. Forward and back. Flicker, flicker.
The warp makes a mockery of any notion of time as linear.
Kai sees him dead, once a haloed messenger of crimson perfection, now a broken sacrifice who guided the executioner’s blade to his own heart. Dead. Unthinkable, and his mind recoils from the horror of this vision. It is vile and spiteful, a parade of horrors conjured for no more reason than to break his spirit.
Yet the warp is capable of so much more, and these are but tasters for a greater horror.
He sees it unfold in unflinching detail, every golden hue of armour, every play of light around features that are ever-changing, but always broken-hearted. He sees hatred, love, guilt, horror, resolve broken and renewed in the same breath, and a depthless well of sadness for a future he sees and knows he has created.
The temporal flow is out of joint, flexing like a broken spine. Though Kai sees this in random flickers of spinning time, he knows this can only be the future.
And it is not distant.
The golden light flinches, and he feels its impossible scrutiny. It is looking back at him. It sees him and knows everything about him in a span of time so small it has no method of being measured. The light sees what he has seen, knows now what he saw upon the raised dais, and he senses a measure of its acceptance of that knowledge.
Words form in his mind, softly spoken and without the need of anything as crude a voice, yet they have the force of the most violent hurricane. He understands these words, and knows now why no mortal should ever hear the voice of a living god.
He sees what happens next in awful clarity, gold and black, master and servant, god and demi-god.
Father and son.
It can end only one way, and the knowledge of what has already happened, but is yet to come is enough to break the sanity of any mortal, no matter how strong their mind might be. Yet Kai has been tempered with guilt and horror, and has a strength beyond that of others.
He has one more task left to perform.
THE VISION VANISHED in burst of golden light and Kai was hurled from the Red Chamber into a place of warmth, aromatic perfumes, scented oils and the sound of a gurgling fountain. He opened his eyes and found himself reclining on a padded couch fashioned from the hide of some exotic beast. His entire body felt as though he floated on an invisible cushion, and all the hurts done to him since his return to Terra were undone.