[SPEAKER_00]: In the deep places of the mountain, where the old cargo roads ran grey and half forgotten through the very bones of the world, there was a specific kind of quiet that it settled on the place after the ground assault on the surface, and cast us, who had been a warrior now for the better part of 200 years, had learned long ago to listen for that silence.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way a sailor learns to listen for the small change in the wind that tells him the
[SPEAKER_00]: The enemy had followed them down here into these tunnels from the outpost above.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ten of them had been chosen to hold this choke point on the tunnel, so that the evacuation could be completed.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, it was not only sons who were being evacuated from this place.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were dark angels, and there were secrets of their past here that could not fall into the hands of the enemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the real mission.
[SPEAKER_00]: Though most of these men did not know it.
[SPEAKER_00]: This silence was the fuel of an enemy, gathering itself for another rush.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was the softness of those that had already fallen settling at last into stillness.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was more than either of these, the space that lived in the small and fragile moment, between one wave breaking and the next coming forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: Into that space, with the heaped dead of the cultist tides still steaming gently upon the cold ferracrete before him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He lowered his great storm shield by a hands-breath, and let himself breathe, and was for one merciful moment, only a tired soul resting in the dark, and not a weapon at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Beside him was another blade guard, so near that the worn edges of their armour touched and rested one upon the other.
[SPEAKER_00]: Revolved did the very same, and he had done it on a hundred worlds across the long years of their fellowship, so many times and through so many dark hours that the small gesture had ceased altogether to be a thing that either of them chose, and had become instead something nearer to a single shared heartbeat, passing between two bodies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two suits of old and honored serimite, leaning by some small fraction toward one another in the gloom.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way that two trees standing long together upon a windward hill, will lean and lean across the slow turning of the seasons, until at the last, their branches have grown so wholly into one another, that no one passing by could say whether one tree ends and the other begins.
[SPEAKER_00]: Neither of them spoke, for there was nothing at all between them that needed saying.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mouth of the tunnel was choked with the enemy's dead, and for the length of one drawn breath that was enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the two of them were, in their weary way, almost content.
[SPEAKER_00]: And behind them, were for an hour and more a heavy boulder had hammered out its slow and faithful thunder.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was now no sound whatsoever, and that silence, too, was a thing well worth the hearing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not, if one came to look upon it plainly, and without the kindness that memory so often lends to such places afterward, a grand or a noble spot in which to make a stand.
[SPEAKER_00]: The vault transit had not been created for glory, nor for the speaking of brave last words, nor for any of the high and stirring purposes that the songs would one day pretend had been woven into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had been dug a very long age ago by unremarkable folk whose thoughts had been chiefly upon the moving of cargo from one place to another and who had wanted only that it'd be sturdy and that it'd be straight.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was an artery of bare-grey ferracrete, bored clean through the deep roots of the mountain, low of roof, and plain of war, and without any ornament to gladden a passing eye.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it ran down from the inner halls of the dark angels outpost, toward the spaceport platforms far below, where the great lifters waited with their engines warming in the cold.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was wide enough for cargo hauling, and that was the whole and only reason why 10 warriors might dare to dream of holding it against the better part of an army.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the mountain itself was the defense, and castors had understood as much in the very first moment that he laid his eyes upon the place.
[SPEAKER_00]: There could be no flanking here in the vault transit, and no encircling, and no being drowned slowly beneath the sheer and pitiless weight of bodies, in the manner that so many good men had been drowned in the wars of that long age of sorrows.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mountain had decided already in its vast indifference, just how many of the enemy might come forward at any single moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was not so many that two shield-bearing brothers and the locked wall of their shields could not stand against them and hold.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they had set themselves each in his place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Castus and Ravel held the mouth of the tunnel together, shoulder to shoulder and she would locked fast against shelled, so that the two of them made between them one single and unbroken wall of serimite, at the very threshold where the close dark of the passage opened outward into the wider dark beyond.
[SPEAKER_00]: And upon that one threshold all the rest of it turned.
[SPEAKER_00]: A little way behind them raised upon a low heap of fallen rock-create that some thought for hand had taken the trouble to drag into place in the last hour before the assault.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hadrior had set his heavy boulder.
[SPEAKER_00]: And through the first long while of the fighting that great gun had been the very metronome of the defense, its slow and steady hammering, measuring out the passing of the seconds,
[SPEAKER_00]: The other brothers, Iskander and Carrus, Vulgan and Steadfast Ulthrid, and Hadrior, there it is gun, filled the body of the passage close behind the shields, and their bolters made a second wall standing ready behind the first, and at the very heart of them all, nestled the chaplain, Malphus.
[SPEAKER_00]: and his crosius are cunning, burned within his fist, amid the gloom like a small and captured star, casting his long shadow black and wavering up the curved stone of the walls.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not race his voice, and so the words of the litanies, when they came from him, came low and even and unharried.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet for all their softness, they reached every ear in that grim place,
[SPEAKER_00]: and far behind them all, and high above, folded away into the crept and dusty dark of a maintenance gantry that overhung the inner length of the passage.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their lay Sabeel in his light-fobus armour, who was the eyes of all of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He alone could see out past the locked shields and into the great hall beyond, where the enemy gathered and seized and made itself ready in the deeper shadow.
[SPEAKER_00]: He alone of all that company saw the things that his brothers hemmed in as they were by close stone of their own work could not.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were cultists, most of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The poor and wretched human chaff that the dark powers sweep up always before them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Men and women who at once own names of their own, and homes, and small and ordinary, and precious lives, before some whisper out of the dark had sought them out, and they, to their everlasting sorrow, had listened.
[SPEAKER_00]: Up the tunnel they came now in a frenzy, trampling one another beneath their own feet in the terrible hunger of their haste to reach the shining warriors at the gate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their mouths held wide, and their eyes held wider, and emptied out of nearly all that had once made them human.
[SPEAKER_00]: And clutched in their hands, the cruel and pitiful weapons of the desperate
[SPEAKER_00]: knives, crude stubguns, and lengths of iron pipe filed down at one end into ugly points.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they came believing that their numbers would surely be enough to carry them through and over and past.
[SPEAKER_00]: But their numbers were never going to be enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shields held, and the boaters fired down the choke point out into the dark, and the heavy gun of Hadrian fired its slow thunder down the packed length of the passage.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cultists died, they died in their dozens, and then they died in their scores, and the narrowness of the place became an instrument of their undoing.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the mountain would suffer only so many of them forward at any one moment, and the few that made it out into the opening, found two brothers with shields and sawouts.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not a battle, it was grim and careful work, the clothes and joyless labor of men who took not the smallest pleasure in any part of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when, at the very last, the wave broke apart upon itself, and the few survivors fled back down into the deeper dark from which they had come.
[SPEAKER_00]: The floor of the vault transit lay carpeted over with the fallen, and not one single drop of the squad's own blood had yet been spilled.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had gone easily, far too easily, and castus mistrusted it, for he had lived a long while, and so he lowered his shield by that one careful hand's breath, and he breathed, and he listened to the quiet again, as it gathered itself once more in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: He would not allow himself, for all the world, to believe that any part of this was simple.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the center of the line, the chaplain Malphus spoke aloud, the words of the litany of the unwavering watch, and his voice was calm.
[SPEAKER_00]: His warriors took heart and comfort from the calm of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly as they were meant to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet beneath the words, in that one sealed in a chamber of himself, into which no brother living had ever once been allowed to set foot.
[SPEAKER_00]: Malphus was thinking,
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not a large thing the casket.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would have fit within a man's two arms.
[SPEAKER_00]: At that very moment, it was being carried down through the lower halls towards the platforms, along in faithful hands that had not the least notion in the world of what it was that they carried.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was to be set aboard the last of the evacuation ships and flung up and out.
[SPEAKER_00]: far away from that dying place into the safety of the void, and it had to rise.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever else might come to pass within the transit tunnels before this long day was done, whoever should live, and whoever should fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: The casket had to leave this place, and reach the waiting fleet, and be carried home again, and it must never be opened.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the whole of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was his duty.
[SPEAKER_00]: The men around him did not know the contents of the relic and how it contained secrets of the fall of their order.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they knew that it must be saved and that they must hold this place until the ship had taken it into the atmosphere.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they were to die, they died for a silence.
[SPEAKER_00]: The chaplain came at length to the end of the litany, and down in the deep dark below, slowly at the first, and then all together, and as one, the enemy began once more to scream.
[SPEAKER_00]: The scream, when it came closer, did not at once become a charge.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was the first strange thing, though only one among them marked it for what it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cultists had gathered themselves in the deeper dark and lifted up their voices as they had before, and every brother along the line set his shoulder a little more firmly, in the expectation of the rush that always followed, and then the rush did not follow.
[SPEAKER_00]: The screaming swelled and held, as though the dark itself were being wound tight like a spring, and still nothing came up the passage, but noise.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they settled over the tunnels, a sense of limbo.
[SPEAKER_00]: The held breath in anticipation of the next wave.
[SPEAKER_00]: The brothers used the time to make small preparations.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hadriel note at his gun and fed a fresh belt into it, with hands that did not hurry and did not falter.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said not a single word, the whole while.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was a man who had long ago given most of his words over to the work of his hands, and found the trade a fair one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Foggan moved down the line behind the shields and gathered up the spent casings where they had fallen.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was counting the use of ammunition and taking mental note of their reserves.
[SPEAKER_00]: Carrus, who was young enough still to find the whole business faintly absurd, leaned his head back against the cold stone, and remarked to no one that he had been promised a life of high crusades and noble enemies, and that nobody had thought to mention, he would spend the best of its standing in a drainage pipe, being shouted at by Madman.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a little apart from the rest, Iskander had bowed his head over his boulder, and was praying for the souls of the people, even now harrying toward the lifters far below, that they might reach them, and rise above the surface, and live.
[SPEAKER_00]: For that, in the end, was the purpose of their defense.
[SPEAKER_00]: While the chaplain knew the more important task was to prevent the relic from landing into the hands of the enemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of the brothers in this group of 10 believe that they were holding the line to allow their other brothers and civilians the time they need to leave this place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind them and below in the lower halls and out upon the cold platforms of the space port, the last of the outpost was emptying itself into the waiting lifters.
[SPEAKER_00]: The garrison, what remained of it, filing a board.
[SPEAKER_00]: The people who had sheltered behind the walls, the cooks and the menders and the keepers of records and all the small, unglorious folk who had kept the place alive through the long siege, gathered up at last and carried out of the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of them were aboard already, or very nearly so.
[SPEAKER_00]: a little more time, an hour perhaps less, and the platforms would stand empty, and the lifters would burn their way up into the sky, and the long stand in the transit tunnels would have bought everything it had been set to buy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Until that hour came, the line held.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was all.
[SPEAKER_00]: The line held, and the people lived, and the brothers asked no more of the matter than
[SPEAKER_00]: So, at least the brothers understood it, and they were content in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Up at the mouth, castors and ravel kept their place.
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not speak, each simply knew where the other was, and how he stood, and what he would do.
[SPEAKER_00]: When ravel shifted his weight to ease a knee, castors took up the half inch of the gate that his brother had given over, and gave it back again, when the knee was eased, and neither of them remarked upon it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were two, and down the line came Tibert, the veteran sergeant.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had served at the chaplain side for the better part of 200 years, had Tibert, and there was no soul living that Malfur's trusted as much.
[SPEAKER_00]: He came now to where the chaplain stood at the centre of the line, and the two of them looked together down the dark length of the passage toward the screaming that would not stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tip of it was silent for a moment, weighing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are spending a long while about it, he said it last, low so that only mouthless might hear.
[SPEAKER_00]: For a rabble, one might almost think there was a mind in it somewhere, ordering the thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there it was, the question, it hung in the air between them.
[SPEAKER_00]: What are we truly holding here and why?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what is in the box that goes up on the last lifter?
[SPEAKER_00]: you will not meet my eye when it is spoken of.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thought.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had earned the right to ask.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew that he had earned it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Malphas, who knew it too, waited in the stillness to see whether the old sergeant would at last reach out and say it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tibble did not.
[SPEAKER_00]: He let the question fall away unfinished, as he had let so many fall away across the years.
[SPEAKER_00]: He turned his eyes back to the dark, and it was not that the answer did not matter to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: But rather that the not asking had become, overall that time, its own kind of faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever's down there, he said, we'll meet it when it comes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Malfa's inclined his head and said nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was grateful in a way he could never let the other man see.
[SPEAKER_00]: By not asking the question, Tbiltered saved him from having to lie to the one face, in all the galaxy, he could not have borne to lie to.
[SPEAKER_00]: A moment later, it was Sabayal, the eliminator, high in his gantry, who first put words
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been watching the deeper dark for a long while now, through the scope of his weapon.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he had begun slowly to mistrust what he saw, or rather to mistrust the shape of it, the manner of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Chaplin, he said, and his voice came down, measured and careful over the vox.
[SPEAKER_00]: They aren't simply throwing themselves at us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Watch the next push, if it comes, they went left first, then right, then heavily down the center, and they're looking to see how long each cost them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was silent a moment, and when he spoke again, there was a new and sober waiting it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That isn't frenzy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone down there is spending them like coin, a handful at a time to learn how we deal with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the centre of the line, where the small star of his crowsiest burn steady in his fist, Chaplin Malfur's heard this.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was as he had feared since the first hour that there were traitor marines leading this assault.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second wave, when at last it broke its long weight, came worse than the first, and the brothers knew it was for worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: It began as the first had begun, with the cultists pouring up the passage in their ragged screaming flood.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there were other things moving in the flood now, among the running men, and heard it along within them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were small, most of them, and lies, and they ran low to the ground on too many limbs, or too few, and where the light fell upon them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were grotesque and mischapeless.
[SPEAKER_00]: lesser things of the warp.
[SPEAKER_00]: What these were?
[SPEAKER_00]: The small hungry children of the dark powers.
[SPEAKER_00]: They came up the tunnel, mingled with the doomed mortals like wolves running in among driven sheep, and the cold of them went before them down the passage like a breath out of an open tomb.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, the defense which had cost nothing at all in the first hour began at last to cost something.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bodies of cultists swarmed forward and were met with boat rounds and power weapons carving through the mass of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shields held, for Sarah might encourage a proof against a great deal of the universe has to offer.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the small warp things did not die as the cultists died, cleanly, and once and for all.
[SPEAKER_00]: And where a bulk round would have ended a man.
[SPEAKER_00]: It only burst one of these, and scattered it into a foundness that hissed, and groaked along the floor, and had to be
[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes, a third.
[SPEAKER_00]: The brothers set themselves hard at a work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hadryl's heavy boulder found a new and fast to rhythm.
[SPEAKER_00]: No longer the slow temple bell of the first hour, but a quicker, fiercer hammering, walking its fire down the packed length of the passage, and tearing the demon things apart before they could close.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for a while, the new rhythm held the line as the old one had, and the brothers
[SPEAKER_00]: The heavy boulder fell silent between one breath and the next, not slowing, not faltering, but simply ceasing all at once, and in the place where it's hammering had been.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was now a hole in the world, and every brother felt the lack of it strike through him, colder than any wound.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hadry or Nelt at his gun, his hands resting upon it.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the chaos spawn had come over the shields in the press of advancing bodies, and had found him.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wrapped a tentacode limb around the weak joint at the base of the helmet, and crushed
[SPEAKER_00]: But there was no time to grieve him.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is so seldom time in such places, for grief.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was Othrid who took up the gun, steadfast Othrid, who had never in all his service been the swiftest, or the fiercest, or the most remarked upon of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: But who was always, when a thing needed doing, somehow, already there.
[SPEAKER_00]: He stepped forward from his gunline, and into the gap that Hadriel had left.
[SPEAKER_00]: His own bolt rifle fired upon the spawn, until the rounds had torn the creature apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he set his hands, where the dead brothers hands had been, and he took up the heavy bolter to fire again.
[SPEAKER_00]: The gun returned to its recognizable tempo, and joined the sounds of battle around them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And high above them all, Saberio's voice came down over the vox, quicker now, and tighter.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's hurting them, he said.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's something at the back of the crowd, past the torchlight, something tall.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's moving against the current.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything else is running at us, and it's holding still, just standing, watching the wayher.
[SPEAKER_00]: The vox crackled and broke, as a fresh surge hit the shields, and the world narrowed to the work of the gate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And whatever Sabayal had been about to like in it too, was lost, and there was no time at all to ask him for it again.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was only the wave and the holding.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Malphus had heard, Malphus had heard all of it, and in the sealed in a chamber of himself, the cold went deeper than any demon's breath could carry it.
[SPEAKER_00]: For he had begun somewhere in the last hour, to feel the casket, as a weight upon his own back, though it was a long way off.
[SPEAKER_00]: Communications had come through, that it had not yet risen.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not know why it had not yet risen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps there was some delay upon the platforms, some press of frightened bodies at the lifter doors causing confusion.
[SPEAKER_00]: He lifted up the litanys of the watch, the old and steadying words, and he set them.
[SPEAKER_00]: not now to harden his warriors, but to be a war.
[SPEAKER_00]: A wall of sound and of ritual raised up between his brother's eyes and the question they must never come to ask, between their faith and the thing that faith was buying, between the line that held and the silence it was dying to keep.
[SPEAKER_00]: Keep your eyes forward, the litanys said beneath their holy words, keep
[SPEAKER_00]: Do not look back, do not look down, do not for the love of all that we are, begin to wonder what it is we guard.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his warriors heard the holy words as they cut through the mass of bodies bearing down on them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The two blade guard veterans stood keeping the bulk of the force of bay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their weapons cleaving arcs through the bodies of the Horde pushing towards them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sniper in his nest took out strays as they made it through on the flanks, and the others with their bolt guns thinned the numbers where they could and dealt with anything that managed to push too far forwards.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the battle wore on in the tunnels, it required more and more from them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Carrus was second to go down, and he died as he had lived, which was with a just still warm upon his tongue.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the third wave, when a knot of larger cold spawn came over the shields all at once, in a place where the line had thinned, Carrus stepped into the gap to seal it, as he
[SPEAKER_00]: He was laughing even then, some small bright wicked thing about how the other marines would frown on him for fighting out of formation, and he sealed the gap, and he held it, and the line behind him reformed, and was whole again, because he had bought the moment for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: but the buying cost him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two more spawn broke past the front line in the chaos and bludgeoned him with warped and violent limbs before anyone could take care of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: His temperament had been a small warm fire in a cold place.
[SPEAKER_00]: and they had warmed their hands at it, more often than they had ever let him know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eskander went in the wave after, and he went on his knees and praying.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had never once stopped praying through all of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not for himself, he had never prayed for himself that any brother heard but always for the others, for the people on the platforms, for the souls of the very cultists.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was even then sending to their deaths that some mercy might find them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wave came up the passage as the others had come, and a great hulking thing came with it, one of the larger horrors that the dark had begun to send among the lesser ones.
[SPEAKER_00]: broad of shoulder, and wrong of shape, and reathed about with cold, and it came on toward the place in the line where it scanned and knelt as he fired, and he saw it come.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not rise, he saw the great cold horror bearing down upon him through the press, and the muscle flash.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he did not scramble up, and he did not give back a single step, but stayed there upon his knees, with his bolter braced against his shoulder, and his lips still moving over the holy words.
[SPEAKER_00]: And met it as it came.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bolter spoke and spoke, the muzzle flare lighting his face from beneath in stutters of white and gold, so that for an instant at a time, he could be seen quite clearly there amid the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then lit again, like a man glimpsed by lightning.
[SPEAKER_00]: His rounds tore into the thing and slowed it, but did not stop it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It loomed up over him, vast against the failing light, and the cold of it fell across him like a shadow, given weight.
[SPEAKER_00]: And still he knelt, and still he prayed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Firing up into the dark of it, even as it reached down for him, the last of his words and the last of his rounds going up together into the thing that was about to kill him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when it took him, it took him midward, his boaters still speaking, and his lips still moving.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the brothers nearer swore afterward that the prayer did not stop when he fell, but only grew quiet, trailing away into the noise of the guns, the way a candle does not so much go out, as give itself up at last to the larger dark around it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether he finished it, none could say.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a gentle thought, and perhaps a foolish one, that somewhere the prayer is finishing still.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vorgan was methodical to the very end.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not fall into a gap, or by a moment, or do any of the bright, desperate things that the others did.
[SPEAKER_00]: He simply kept on at his work, keeping an eye on the line, on the reserve ammunition, counting and noting, and tending the line as a gardener tens a flower bed, until the work and the wave came to the same place at the same moment, and the wave was stronger.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mass of creatures proving too much for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, Oathred, steadfast, unremarkable, Oathred, who had taken up Adrian's gun and held it through wave upon wave.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oathred fell at the last, and his falling was the one that ached the most, precisely because there was so little to say of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had never been the swiftest, or the fiercest, no song would ever name him.
[SPEAKER_00]: No brother would ever tell of his deeds by a fire, for he had done no deeds that told well, only the long unbroken every day faithfulness of simply being there, and doing the thing in front of him, and being there again the next day to do the next thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the kind of soul that the Imperium is in truth built upon, and never once things to thank, the ones who do not shine, and do not falter, and are not missed until the moment they are gone, and the whole edifice leans suddenly into the space where they had been standing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He took up the gun when Hadriel fell, and he held it, and then he did not, and the gun fell silent a second time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ten had become by slow and bitter retrition, but a handful, and it was then in the long after all threat, that the tall thing at the back of the dark at last came forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sabael saw it first, as he had seen all things first.
[SPEAKER_00]: Chaplin, he said, and there was a new note in his voice now, a note that none of them had heard from him in all the long hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: It sounded like the note of a man who does not wish to believe the thing his own eyes are telling him.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's coming up, the tall one, it's armored.
[SPEAKER_00]: This news was followed by a silence and the small hiss of the vox and below it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The screaming hushed now, drawing back, as though even the demons made way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Power armour, plate, and serimite.
[SPEAKER_00]: It walks like us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Chaplin, it's one of ours, it's a… I know what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Malphas said softly, and he did not ask the question that any other soul in his place would have asked, which was who?
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not ask Sabayel to describe the heraldry or the colours or the marks upon the plate, as a man does who is trying to learn the name of a thing, he does not know.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not try to learn it, he already knew it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the flat and terrible certainty of those four small words, I know what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: The truth turned over for the first time in the dark, where the brothers could feel the shape of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: though not yet the substance that the thing coming up the passage and the thing in the casket were not two secrets but one and that their chaplain had known from the first hour exactly who had assaulted this place.
[SPEAKER_00]: The figure came on into the light and stood at the far edge of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: where the gold of the Holy Fire failed, and the dark began, and it was indeed one of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or had been, long ago, the plate was ancient, and it was wrong, mad and remade in dark ways, that the bones of it were the bones of a sun of the lion, and the great cold patience with which it stood was a patience the brothers knew in their own narrow, for it was their own.
[SPEAKER_00]: It did not roar, it did not rush.
[SPEAKER_00]: It only looked at them across the little distance, and then it looked past them.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the one figure standing at the center of the line, and when it spoke, its voice was low and even and unharried, and it was most horribly of all, a kind voice.
[SPEAKER_00]: The voice of an old friend taking up a conversation long set down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello Chaplin, it's said, how long has it been, that you have stood at gates like this one, keeping the door shut on what is behind you?
[SPEAKER_00]: You and I have always been doorkeepers, we have only ever disagreed about which side of the door the worst thing stands on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Malphas said nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: They do not know, the figure went on gently, almost sorrowfully, and it tilted its ruined head toward the brothers along the line.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look at them, all this faith, and not one of them has been told what it is buying.
[SPEAKER_00]: You let them die for the box, and you do not let them so much as glimpse what is in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wonder sometimes, which of us the chapter, or truly to have struck from its parchment?
[SPEAKER_00]: the one who looked inside, or the one who spends good men's lives to keep the lid down and call it duty.
[SPEAKER_00]: The kind voice softened further still, into something almost tender.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will give you their lives, Malfas, all of them, even now, tender side from the gate, and let me pass.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I will not touch a single one of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need only let them live.
[SPEAKER_00]: Surely that is a thing you can tell them that you spared them.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need never tell them why.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a fair offer in its way, that was the venom in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stand aside, and the brothers live, and the only price was the one thing that could never be paid, and the dying brothers along the line heard the offer of their own lives, and did not understand the rest of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The doorkeepers and the box, and the looking inside.
[SPEAKER_00]: For it was spoken in a tongue beneath the words that only Malphus knew how to read.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Tibble stood near, and Tibble was no fool, and Tibble had 200 years of knowing this chaplain's silences, and the brothers saw the old sergeants head turn, slowly, from the figure in the dark to the chaplain at the centre of the line, and they saw him begin, just begin, together the pieces of it, toward an answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: which of us the chapter ought to have struck from its roles, the box, the looking inside, the thing in the casket that goes up on the last lifter, which the chaplain will not meet his eye to speak of, and the thing in the armour that the chaplain knew without asking.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tipl stood at the very edge of understanding, one short step from it, with the whole shape of the secret laid out before him in the dark, and needing only that he reached down and take it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it would have cost him nothing to take it, nothing at all, save everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Malphas who could not let that conversation finish, who could not let the next sentence be spoken, where tibbots ears might at last assemble it whole, answered the only way that would end it before it ended them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not answer with words, for words with a weapon his enemy had chosen, and the ground his enemy had picked.
[SPEAKER_00]: He answered with the crosius.
[SPEAKER_00]: He came off the line and into the dark in a single movement, and the small captured star of the Holy Fire came up and around in a great golden arc, and it fell upon the figure in the ancient plate, with all the weight of two centuries, and one unbearable secret behind it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the talk was over, because Malphas could not let the secrets of the fallen be shared with anyone in that room.
[SPEAKER_00]: And tibult, old tibult, faithful tibult, who had stood one short step from the truth, with his hand or but upon it, raised his boulder.
[SPEAKER_00]: He set his eyes upon the enemy he could understand, and he stood with his chaplain in the one way left to him, that asked no answers.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was Sabayal who saw it, of course, for he was the highest of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He watched from his cramped and dusty gallery, while one by one the brothers he loved went down into the dark below him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he could do nothing for any of them, but mark where they fell.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, away through the broken vault at the far in the end of his sight, outpassed the platforms and the cold and the streaming smoke, he saw the ship that carried their relic
[SPEAKER_00]: It came up slowly at first, heaving itself up off the platform on the long column of its fire, as though the very world were loath to let it go.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it found its strength, and it climbed faster and faster, up and up through the murk, and the falling ash toward the high pale gap, where the sky still showed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He watched it the whole way.
[SPEAKER_00]: He could not have said why it mattered so much to him to watch it all the way up.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not know what it carried, no more than any of them did save the one.
[SPEAKER_00]: But something in him understood that this was the thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: This rising, this small fierce climbing light, and he held it in his eye until it cleared the murk, and broke out into the clean, high air beyond, and dwindled there to a star.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then was gone, up and out in a way, beyond the smoke, beyond the platforms, beyond all the reach of anything that walked or crawled or hungered in the dark below.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a way he said over the vox, and his voice was rough.
[SPEAKER_00]: Chaplin, the last lifters away, it's up and clear and climbing.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've made it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's gone, and down in the center of the line, with the ruin plate of his enemy before him, and the small star of his crosius, burning low now in his weary hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: Chaplin, Malphas.
[SPEAKER_00]: heard those four words, it's up and clear, and something went out of him that he had been carrying since before the first wave broke.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some long held tension that he had not dared to set down for even an instant in all the hours of the standing, and for one breath, one single breath in all that grim day.
[SPEAKER_00]: He closed his eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was done.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever else came now, the thing was done.
[SPEAKER_00]: The casket was beyond the murk, and beyond the sky, and climbing still, outpassed the atmosphere of that dying world into the void.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wait would be taken up by the waiting fleet, and carried home again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was nothing now, nothing in all the galaxy, that the figure in the ancient plate could do to call it back down.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had come for it across who knew how many years and how many betrayals the thing that had once been a son of the lion, and he had come so very near, and he had lost, and he knew it.
[SPEAKER_00]: In defeat there was a terrible stillness that had washed over him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the stillness broke, and what came after, it was fury.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a fury that belongs only to those who have come within a single hand's breath of a thing they have wanted, passed all reason, and have seen it lifted away from them forever in an instant, and it is a worse and a wilder thing by far than the fury of
[SPEAKER_00]: The figure in the dark through back its ruined head, and the kind and unhurried voice was gone, and what came out of it in its place was a sound that the brothers would carry into whatever short remainder of their lives was left to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And behind that sound, the whole dark length of the passage seemed to surge forward at once.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cultists in the chaos spawn, and the howling renegade lord of them all, no longer measuring, no longer spending, no longer patient, but flinging themselves at the gate in one great final wave of denied and maddened ruin.
[SPEAKER_00]: and so the meaning of the standing changed, in that moment entirely, and the brothers felt it change, though they could not have said how they knew, until now they had held the gate for something, for the lifter, for the people, for the casket climbing toward the sky.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had held so that others might escape, and they had been a kind of warmth in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The warmth of a purpose, of a door kept shut so that those behind it might run.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the lifter was away, and the people were saved, and the casket was beyond or reach, and the purpose was accomplished, and gone up into the void with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: What was left to them now was not holding for something.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was only holding.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would not step back from the gate, though stepping back could no longer buy anything that was not already bought, because the gate was theirs, and they were its keepers.
[SPEAKER_00]: The line had thinned out of the principles alone, to cast us and ravol at the mouth, to
[SPEAKER_00]: A handful, where there had been ten, and the wave came on.
[SPEAKER_00]: They set themselves to meet it, not because it would save anyone, because they were unforgiven, and the door was theirs, and they would keep it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now of all the hard things that came to pass in the transit tunnels upon that day, this that follows is the hardest to tell, and I would pass it by if I could, and let it lie unspoken.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was important, and it would be a discurtersy to them to look away from it now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Castas and Ravel held the mouth as they had held it from the first hour, shoulder to shoulder and shield to shield.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when the great last wave came howling up the passage, in all its maddened fury, the two of them met it as they had met every wave before.
[SPEAKER_00]: The horde crashed against the ceremony shields and was cut down by the crackle of power swords.
[SPEAKER_00]: For a long while they looked like avenging gods, immune to the mass of bodies that were hurling themselves at the pair.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cultists broke upon them, and the cold, wobb things broke upon them, and the howling lord of ruin himself came against them once and was turned, and still the wall of their two shields stood unbroken at the threshold.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it seemed for a time, as though the end might be cheated yet a little longer, as though the two of them together were simply too strong and too practiced and too holy one for even this to undo.
[SPEAKER_00]: But no war stands forever, and the wave was very great, and it found at the last the one small place where it could enter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Revel fell.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is enough to say that one of the cold things came through in the press at the wrong instant.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the one instant when castus was turned the other way and could not reach him and that when it was done, Revel was down upon the blooded stone and did not rise.
[SPEAKER_00]: 200 years they had stood together, 200 years across more worlds than either of them could any longer have named, and now one of the two was gone, all at once and forever in a single bad heartbeat.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Castas did not break.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the thing that the story would speak of after, in the low voices that men keep for these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: That castors did not break, and did not fall back, and did not so much as cry out.
[SPEAKER_00]: He turned, and he saw that rattle was gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: and something passed across him in that moment that none of them had words for.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he set his feet, and he widened his stance, and he took up into himself the whole of the gate that the two of them had held between them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where two shields had stood, now there was one, and one did not give the width.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even with the supporting gunfire from his brothers.
[SPEAKER_00]: A single warrior cannot hold a gate made for two.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet casters seem to be holding it nonetheless, alone, for far longer than most would have thought possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a strange thing to say that grief can hold a gate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind him, in the little time that this holding board, Tibble did the last grim work that was left to be done.
[SPEAKER_00]: For Malfa said, given the order in the long, after all-thrid fell, to Tibble to long, that the charges be set, that the mountain itself be made ready to come down.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Diff the Gate could not be held forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: then it should at the last be closed in the only way that would close it past all reopening, and the enemy sealed in the dark behind a thousand thousand tons of stone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the setting of such charges is not quick work, and it cannot be done in the press of the fighting.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it could be done at all, only because castors stood in the mouth.
[SPEAKER_00]: He bought with his loan and grieving body the minutes that the work required.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tibelt set the charges, he moved along the passage with sure, unhurried hands.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he did not let himself look up at Caster's while he worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: Castors did fall at the last.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course he fell.
[SPEAKER_00]: No body, however willing, can do the work of two souls forever, and the wave was without number, and it found him as it had found rava.
[SPEAKER_00]: He went down at the threshold he had kept.
[SPEAKER_00]: and there is a small mercy in this at least that he fell where Ravel had fallen, in the same few feet of bloodied stone, so that the two of them, who had stood together for all that time, lay together at the end in the place that had been theirs.
[SPEAKER_00]: The width was open now, there was no one left to hold the mouth other than the bautifier, and though the mass of munition was great,
[SPEAKER_00]: high in his gantry, alone, sabayal lay along the cold iron, and put his eye once more to the scope of his weapon.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been picking off the largest of the spawn with his rifle, trying to protect his brothers from the worst of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The chaos space marine seemed to know where he was, and would not allow himself to be in line of sight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now he did the last and the most important thing that was left in all the world for him to do, which was not to fire it.
[SPEAKER_00]: For he could see from where he lay, the whole length of the passage laid out beneath him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The charges that Timbert had set, glinting faintly along the walls where the others could not mark them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the figure in the ancient plate, moving up through cover towards the chaplain.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he understood, with the cold clear understanding, that his high lonely perch had taught him across the years, that the mountain could be brought down to see the gate, only at the one right moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that the one right moment was the moment when the renegade Lord had come fully forward, past the line of the charges, deep enough into the throat of the place that the falling stone
[SPEAKER_00]: too soon, and the enemy would be shut out, but not shut in, and would dig, and would come again.
[SPEAKER_00]: Too late, and there would be no one left living to give the word.
[SPEAKER_00]: And only Sabayel, high above, could see the line.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it felt to him, to watch, and to wait, and to call the moment, not a shot this time, but a single word that would bring the roof of the world down upon them all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not yet, he said softly, over the vox, watching the ruined figure come on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not yet, Chaplin, keep him, hold him there, not yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: And below, in the dark, Chaplin Malphas set himself to the one task left him, which was to fight an enemy he could not beat.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew that he could not kill the thing in the ancient plate.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had been a son of the lion once, and it was something far worse than that now.
[SPEAKER_00]: swollen with the dark gifts of its long apostasy, and Malphus was old and weary, and had been fighting for days before the first wave broke in this place.
[SPEAKER_00]: In any honest contest of arms, the renegade lord would have ended him in a handful of exchanges.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Malphas did not need to win the contest.
[SPEAKER_00]: He needed only to prolong it, to stand in the throat of the passage and hold the great murder of there.
[SPEAKER_00]: In that one place, over the unseen charges, for as long as a body could be made to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He gave ground, but never too much ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: He let the crowsiest falter, but never quite fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: He fought like a chaplain too proud and too stubborn to lie down and die.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was exactly the thing the Renegade Lord took him for.
[SPEAKER_00]: A doorkeeper keeping his door to the bitter foolish end.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the renegade lord, drunk on his denied fury, and certain of the kill, stayed to savor it, and came on, and on, deeper into the dark, and did not see the trap.
[SPEAKER_00]: During this time, Tibert had armed the explosives, and as he rose from the equipment, the tide that Malfus could not hold, reached past the edges of the fight, and found him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Tibert fell, there at the last charge, with the work finished, and his hands still upon it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He died never having been told what it was he had set the charges to bury, never having learned what the box held, or who the thing in the plated bin, or why his chaplain had held himself into the dark to break a conversation, rather than let its last sentence fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: Malphas did not tell him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He let the old sergeant go down into death, carrying nothing heavier than his faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are not many kindnesses left in the galaxy of that age.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was one of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Malphas gave it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, said Sabio Farabov, his voice breaking on the word.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's past the line.
[SPEAKER_00]: Chaplain.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Malphas broke a contact.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did the one thing in all the fight that he had not yet done.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing he had held in reserve through every careful losing exchange.
[SPEAKER_00]: he struck, truly struck, with all that was left in him.
[SPEAKER_00]: A single great blow of the crosius that drove the Renegade Lord back half a step, and bought him the half breath he needed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he turned, and ran, dragging his own body up the passage away from the dark, while behind him the thing in the ancient plate understood at last, too late.
[SPEAKER_00]: What the stubborn old priest had truly been doing?
[SPEAKER_00]: The half-brith was enough, Tibbet's last charge took the word that Sabayal had given, and the mountain answered.
[SPEAKER_00]: It came down all at once, the whole vast weight of stone, that had stood above since before the outpost was ever built.
[SPEAKER_00]: The roof of the world, folding down, into the throat of the passage in thunder.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it took the renegade lord where he stood, in the deep place past the line of the charges, and it closed over him, and it sealed him in.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was not slain, a thing such as he had become, does not so easily die, and somewhere down in that crushed and lightless deep, he would live for a while, sealed past digging and hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was buried alive with the very secret he had crossed the long years to drag up into the light.
[SPEAKER_00]: Shut in the dark with it forever, the keeper and the kept become at last the same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ward into the silence he had come to break.
[SPEAKER_00]: The unforgiven did not destroy their shame that day.
[SPEAKER_00]: They never do.
[SPEAKER_00]: They only buried it deeper and set one more sleepless thing to keep it company in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Malfur's ran, he ran on an exhausted body, up through the failing holes while the mountain came down behind him, out at the last onto the cold and empty platforms, where one single lightship yet remained, with its engine screaming, and its ramp still down.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there above him in the hatchway, against all hope, was Sabeo, who had not died when his gantry was overrun.
[SPEAKER_00]: but had fallen back along the high iron ways toward the platforms and reached the last ship.
[SPEAKER_00]: He held it and waited, watching the dark for the one brother who might yet come.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their eyes met across the little distance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sabeo reached down with his hand, and he hauled his chaplain up out of the dying world in a board, and the ramp closed, and the last
[SPEAKER_00]: The outpost fell in the end, but it had never truly been the thing that mattered, only the wall around the thing that mattered, and walls are built to be spent.
[SPEAKER_00]: The lifters carried away those they could carry, and the dark came up out of the deep places, and took the rest.
[SPEAKER_00]: and in a little while there was nothing left upon that grey and broken world, but the wind, and the ash, and the long slow settling of stone upon stone, in the places where the mountains had come down.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has gone now that outpost, few living souls could tell you it ever stood at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the casket reached the fleet, the outpost had been built to find it, and it had been found.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was taken up out of the void by careful hands, the hands of those few who were permitted to know that there was anything to take up a tour, and it was carried down into the deep and guarded places of the chapter where their secrets are kept.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was set back into the silence from which it had been so nearly dragged, the long silence that had hounded for who knows how many hundreds of years, and that would hold it now for hundreds more.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would be unspoken of, sealed and dark and safe, exactly as it had been.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing that ten warriors had died to keep unopened remained unopened.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the victory.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the records of the chapter, the matter was set down plainly, briefly, and with perfect truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: the record honored them in the only way the chapter could afford to do, which was to make their death sound small and ordinary and complete and to close the book upon them gently so that no one reading it after would ever think to ask the one question that must not be asked, and on the lifter climbing up away from the dying world into the cold, clean dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: The two who lived
[SPEAKER_00]: They sat across the narrow hold, the chaplain and the eliminator, and between them their lay a silence that was not the silence of men who have nothing to say, but the far heavier silence of men who have a great deal to say and may not say it.
[SPEAKER_00]: For Malfa's did not know how much Sabaiel had seen, from his high place the watcher had looked down upon the hole of it, upon the figure in the ancient plate, upon the heraldry beneath the corruption.
[SPEAKER_00]: and upon the chaplain who had known the thing without asking, and had broken a conversation with a blow to keep its last words unspoken.
[SPEAKER_00]: Malphas did not know how much of that the younger brother had understood, nor how much he had merely seen, and not yet understood.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nor whether the understanding might come to him later, in some quiet hour, assembling itself out of the things he had witnessed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Saber, for his part, did not know whether he was permitted to have seen what he had seen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether the looking had been a part of his duty, or a trespass upon a thing above his station.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether the chaplain across from him was a brother he had blood beside, or a keeper, who would one day have to decide what was to be done, about a man who had watched too closely from too high a place.
[SPEAKER_00]: so they did not speak of it, they did not speak of any of it, and in that space the whole long sorrow of their fight passed from the old man to the young one.
[SPEAKER_00]: If there were to be songs and stories told of the day, they would be about how ten bodies held against a tide of enemies so that others could live.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would be told as an evacuation of people, no mention of relics or
[SPEAKER_00]: Carrus, with his half-finished chest, and his candor with his prayer still trailing into the dark, and Vorgan with his counting, and steadfast, all-thread, whom no one ever thought to thank, and hadriol, and his great gun, and castus and ravor.
[SPEAKER_00]: who laid down together at the last in the place that had been theirs, and all tibbled who died never knowing the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of them, every one, will go down into the long memory of the galaxy, as men who died so that others could live.