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Hunger tore through him, all-consuming. Thirst clawed at his throat like the shackles cutting into the skin around his wrists. His mouth felt empty, dry as Baal’s desert sands, even though the blood-sweet stench of his own wounds was making him drool.
The rage burned so hot it hurt. Phosphorus-bright, unquenchable. He’d cried out from the pain of it, from loss, from grief, for hours, for days.
For someone to make it stop.
For something to kill.
When the cell door opened, he leapt. There was no conscious thought behind it, only instinct and starvation. He was a beast bred for destruction, gene-wrought to kill, maddened by agony. Hunger-blind, feral, he aimed himself fangs first at the fresh scent of blood, and pounced.
Chains snapped taut, clipping his flight.
If he’d worn his fusion-powered battleplate, he could have ripped the tether from the reinforced bulkhead wall. If he’d had his sword, adamantium-forged and nano-edged, he could have cut the heavy links. But he had neither, nothing but his naked flesh and naked hands, broken nails scratching at the filthy deck. He was a beast snarling with inhuman fury, lost to reason, leashed and caged.
“Do you know yourself?” a voice asked from the open door.
The beast—
“What is your name?” The voice was tinged with worry and sorrow.
He—
There was significance to the question. A scrap of memory surfaced. Ranks of warriors standing at attention in the sleeting rain, waiting to meet someone— someone significant— someone whose first words spoken to them, to him, had been that very question. But the memory slipped away.
“I am…” he slurred, but no name came to his lips. He was a predator in the dark, a nameless beast.
“What. Is. Your. Name.” Not a question, this time. An order, spoken in a voice that could not be disobeyed.
“I am,” the beast rasped, every word drawn painfully from deep within, “Helik Redknife. Wolf Lord of the Rout.” No. That wasn’t right. “I am Jonor Stiel,” he tried again. “I… I am Valdin. I am Ferakul.”
Each name rolled awkwardly off his tongue as if he’d never spoken it before. A jarring succession of impressions flashed before his eyes, remnants of stolen lives. Moments of violent ends. He had bled. He had died. He had lived again in the blood, over and over.
He spoke the only certain truth he knew: “I am hunger. I am death.”
“Do you know who chained you?” the voice asked, closer now.
This, the beast remembered. Ungentle hands forcing restraints around his wrists. The click of a key in unbreakable locks, the dull clatter of it on the metal deck out of reach. A deep voice, raw with disgust, spitting judgment at him. Out of control. Shameful. Disgrace to the Legion. The beast growled. He knew that name. His oldest enemy, his most bitter rival. “Nassir Amit chained me.”
There was a pause. A contemplative hesitation.
“I see,” said the voice. Two words, with the weight of worlds behind them. The sense of a decision made, a verdict passed.
The bloodscent struck him like a mass-reactive round to the chest. He cried out helplessly, hearts hammering, at the smell of salvation so close, so close.
“Drink,” the voice commanded.
He obeyed. He couldn’t have refused if he’d wanted to. He cared for nothing else but the bite. Fangs to flesh, blood to bliss.
The rushing heat of living blood guided him. Again, he struck blind. This time, dry-cracked lips kissed perfect skin. Teeth penetrated impossibly deep, the hammerblow beat of a pulse teasing his tongue, the taste of another life filling his mouth. Trembling, moaning, he swallowed the blood, clinging to its source with more passion than he’d ever embraced a lover.
The roaring fire of it filled his gut. The sublime alchemy of the omophagea flooded his mind. He sucked the warm vitae into his mouth and felt his hearts thrash under reinforced ribs like wild things fighting to escape a cage, his naked cock straining against cool air. With each swallowed mouthful, he felt days, years, centuries of agony vanish.
He had tasted this blood before. A long time ago, before he’d become what he was. It had made him what he was. Now it remade him, a red sacrament of transubstantiation, divine flesh sating hunger, immortal blood sating thirst. He wept from the taste. Salt and iron, damnation, absolution.
“Please,” the voice breathed, so softly that, despite his transhuman senses, he almost didn’t hear it. A whispered prayer not meant for him.
Nassir Amit opened his eyes.
He was on his knees. He had no idea how much time had passed in the dark place where words had no meaning.
“Who—” Amit shook his head, grasping at words like handfuls of desert sand. “Whose blood was that?”
“You know whose.”
Forgetting even to breathe, Amit looked up. Above him, haloed by the soft light slanting in through the hatch, great pinions framed a perfect face overflowing with boundless compassion.
When Amit last had seen his sire, on the baleful plains of Signus Prime, the angel had stood resplendent in golden war-plate, his greatsword held aloft as he swore oaths of vengeance against traitors and daemons. Now he wore only a simple robe of heavy silk, his feet bare in soft caligae. He looked as if he had stepped onto the Victus straight from a leisurely stroll on a compliant garden world.
The Imperial Truth held that religion was heresy, faith a sin, but in his heart of hearts Amit knew this was a miracle.
“You were fallen, lord,” he said, hardly daring to believe his own eyes. “I felt it. I felt you die.” The memory of it still haunted him, the battle-strained grasp on his sanity slipping at the sudden, inexplicable, inescapable realisation that his primarch was gone.
For a moment, the lines of exhaustion etched on Sanguinius’ features looked deeper than the healing lacerations. “You felt me suffer a grievous blow,” he said only, leaving some dark horror unspoken. “But I am recovered. I am hale.” There were tears in Sanguinius' eyes, anguish giving way to joyful relief, and he reached for Amit’s hands. “As are you now.”
“Don’t—“ Amit cried out, drawing back. “Please, lord, don’t come closer. I’m not in control of myself.” He still felt the lingering adrenaline of combat, the butcher’s thrill. He remembered fighting on Signus Prime, hordes of warp-fiends threatening to overwhelm his Company. He remembered— betrayal. The Space Wolves. Pure inchoate rage. Beyond that, nothing but madness and blood. He was naked, so he must have come from his arming chamber, but he did not recall it, nor the flight to the Victus, nor the end of fighting. He wondered how many innocents he had killed. He wondered who had imprisoned him. He could see enough to tell they were on one of the deep decks, the bilges where the Legion hid its darkest secrets so they would never be brought to light.
He remembered hands restraining him, a voice calling him shameful, a disgrace to the Legion. It had been. . .
. . .his own voice. His own hands.
Sanguinius bent to pick up something from the floor.
“You lost control, but you did not lose yourself,” the angel said, holding up the key to the manacles around Amit’s wrists. Ignoring Amit’s protest, he stepped in close to unlock the restraints.
“For the love of Terra, Nassir, you chained yourself in a containment cell and threw away the key,” Sanguinious sighed, with exasperated fondness. “Those are the acts of a man, not a beast. A beast knows not duty, nor remorse, nor bonds of brotherhood. It does not step willingly into the cage to keep others safe from its hunger.”
The hunger. The berserk, furious rage. The need, overpowering, mind-consuming, that had destroyed every ounce of control he’d painstakingly built in the Twelfth Legion gladiator pits.
“I need—” Amit trailed off. The words were rote reflex with nothing to drive them. He was no longer the beast, as far away from that mindless hunger and rage as he’d ever been. The thirst that had crushed him so tightly, washing all the world scarlet, was gone.
He could smell the blood on his breath, feel the pleasant sloshing fullness of his guts.
He didn’t like it. Without the thirst, he didn’t know what he needed. Without it, he wasn’t sure he even knew who he was.
“I need,” Sanguinius said gently, sensing his distress. “I need you, Nassir. Our Legion needs you. Anything I can give to keep you, I will, and gladly.” He rolled his thumbs over the abrasions ringing Amit’s wrists, massaging circulation back into the bruised skin. “I’d only wish you weren’t too proud to ask for it.”
At his primarch’s touch, a new yearning rose in him, as overpowering as blood-need.
“Please, lord,” he whispered, “let me see that you are unharmed.” He still wasn’t sure this wasn’t a hallucination brought on by combat psychosis.
Sanguinius spread his great wings and held his arms out for inspection, a perfect Vitruvian figure. As he did, the cloak fell away from his arm.
Amit’s eye was drawn at once to the blood that had poured from it, staining Sanguinius’ palm, his slender fingers. Not just from a single bite but dozens, deep crescents overlapping from the heel of his palm to the soft inside of his elbow. Cruel fangs had torn the skin and flesh, baring tendons and veins, in places down to the pale hard bone. Even the angel’s transhuman healing was struggling to scab over the damage. The smell of iron and salt hung fresh in the air, from the open wounds, from the blood drying on his own face. His primarch’s blood. He could feel it on his skin, taste it on his tongue. He feared he might vomit it back up, sick with horror.
“I did that?” he whispered. Something he might once have called fear constricted his throat.
“You did only what I asked you to do.” Sanguinius’ hand came up to cradle his face and lift it with surpassing gentleness so their eyes could meet. Amit could not look away. “You are my Blade.” The angel stroked his cheek softly with a thumb. “It is a poor warrior who whets his sword and curses it for cutting him.”
“This isn’t the Tempest of Angels.”
“All of life is the Tempest of Angels,” Sanguinius said softly. He looked at Amit with great sadness in his eyes. “I ask much of you and your brothers. Some days I fear I’m placing on you a burden too heavy even for transhuman hearts to carry. And yet every day, you give me more than I ever dared hope for. Your loyalty humbles me. Your trust gives me strength. You, Nassir, are bold and ruthless and unfaltering in your duty, and if you have flaws, then so do I. I am proud of you, you and your brothers, and of this Legion we have built together.”
“The day you came to the Legion, lord,” Amit said, overcome by emotions he didn't know and couldn't name, “you did not command us to kneel before you, bound us by no oaths of allegiance. You swore you would serve us instead, until you had proven yourself worthy of us.”
Amit went to his knees. He bowed and kissed the hem of Sanguinius’ robe, his sandalled feet, the floor between them.
“My Primarch.”
“My son,” Sanguinius said, fresh tears lining his eyes.
Amit ached to reach up and brush them away, to comfort his primarch.
“Will you let me serve you, lord?” he asked, still shaking and tense, needing as much to comfort himself with the reassurance of his primarch’s restored health, the reaffirmation of the blood binding them.
Sanguinius smiled. “You already do, better than I could ever have wished for.”
“Thank you, Lord,” Amit said. “But I meant—“ he leaned forward on his knees until his lips almost touched the front of Sanguinius’ tunic and the tumescence disturbing the draped folds of his robe “—I want to serve you.”
“Oh.” For the first time Amit could recall, Sanguinius seemed taken aback. Amit knew not why. It was no shock to him that his primarch would react the same as all of them to the bloodscent still hanging in the air. This was their design. The sublimation of lust into bloodlust, the penetration of flesh by fang, by blade, by bolt shell, by cock, all twisted up together. Carnal, carnage, carnivorous so close in word and deed.
Maybe it was because Amit had never before offered this particular act of service. He had been made to obey without question, without resentment, but Sanguinius had never asked this of him, had been very careful to not even imply he might want it, to give his most recalcitrant son the freedom of a true choice. But he wanted it now, with a strength that surprised him. He had heard of this from other Legions, the overpowering need to reassure himself that his primarch was back with him unharmed, to pledge his devotion, but he had never before experienced it himself. Sanguinius had never not returned triumphant.
He wondered for the first time about that impulse in primachs. Sanguinius had worried about him, searched all of the Victus for him. He had come alone. Even Amit’s transhuman senses heard no other heartbearts in the corridors beyond. The oldest crew on the Victus had served the Revenant Legion and knew to stay clear of their masters afflicted by the crimson fury, but the angel never went anywhere without his Sanguinary Guard—
Except to attend the one duty he had claimed for his own. The one that brought him the most sorrow of all.
The thought of causing his primarch pain by his own death, when only moments ago he had been screaming for it all to end—
Amit closed the distance between them and pressed a kiss to the hard length underneath the silk. He could smell his lord’s desire, filling his lungs and making him ache.
“It is a poor warrior who whets his sword and puts it away unpolished,” he said, looking up at his primarch through his lashes. He was the furthest thing from a fey youth two centuries of war could forge. Once, he had been beautiful, Adonic perfection the gift of genetic apotheosis. Now scars covered his body, from firearms and blades and the claws of monsters stalking the darkness between the stars. Even so, colour rose in Sanguinius’ cheeks and he looked down at Amit as if he was something precious and fragile.
“You said to tell you what I need, and not let pride silence me.”
“I did say that,” Sanguinius smiled.
“I need to suck your balls dry, lord,” Amit said.
His words startled a half-scandalized laugh out of the angel. “Very well,” Sanguinius said. “If that is what you need, then rise. Come to my bed.”
Amit froze, the grin dying on his face.
A shard of true-fear, primarch-fear, stabbed through him. He’d felt it only once before in his life, that night in the rain when Sanguinius had first stood before his Legion to judge it and claim it.
“I—” he trailed off. What could he say? That he did not belong in his primarch’s bed? Silks and softness were for the likes of Raldoron and Azkaellon, those who served with honour, for glory. Amit had always served here, belonged here, in the darkness and filth, with blood in his mouth. He knew, of course he knew, that he wasn't the son anyone would want if a choice had been given. Not a Baalite pureblood but a prison-born mutant turned weapon, turned monster. He was a good killer, among the best in any Legion, but killing was all he was good for. To imagine himself spread out pliant on samite sheets, those artist’s hands touching him— The thought was absurd. Even now, Sanguinius was drawing away, frowning.
“I do not belong there, lord.” Bitterness pooled in the back of Amit’s throat, burning like unspat acid. “Forgive me, I should not have spoken.”
“Hush.”
When Amit looked up, the angel met his gaze unguarded, eyes filled with a father’s unconditional love.
“Is that why you kept yourself at a distance all these years? Because you thought I wouldn’t want you?”
Sanguinius crouched down, caressing Amit’s face before gently, so gently, pulling him forward into a kiss. It started softly, chaste, the faintest press of perfect rose lips against Amit’s scarred, split, red-stained mouth.
Then Sanguinius’s fingers curled under Amit’s chin to lift it, and his tongue slipped out to lick at the drying blood smeared across Amit’s face. He chased into Amit’s mouth after it, deepening the kiss into something ravenous.
Amit dared to meet his primarch’s hunger with his own. His tongue found a fang much longer than his and tested its sharpness until their mingled spit tasted freshly of copper, feeling Sanguinius’ answering smile. The primarch pulled away to trace the messy trails of blood down Amit’s chin to his throat, pressing a teasing, nipping kiss to the hammering pulse point at the corner of his jaw before reclaiming his mouth as decisively as a warlord breaching an enemy’s defenses. They broke apart only when even Amit’s genhanced physique could no longer endure, gasping deeply for breath with all three of his lungs.
“I am not my brothers either,” Sanguinius said softly. “I am not Fulgrim, to demand impossible perfection. I am not Ferrus, to deny myself the pleasures of my body.” His expression turned hard. “And I am not Horus, to betray those who love me most.”
He rose, wings spreading behind him to form a perfect aquila. “I am Sanguinius, the Angel of Blood, Primarch of the Ninth Legion, and I swore to you on the day we met that there is nowhere you can go where I won't stand with you.”
He winked down at Amit, a sly smile playing at his lips. “Or lie with you, as it is.”
This time, it was Amit who gave a surprised laugh. “Standing is fine, lord, for what I asked.”
He reached up and undid the braided cord that held Sanguinius’s robes closed, pushing the silk aside to bare the hard length of Sanguinius’s cock. The sight of it made his hearts beat faster.
Sanguinius shivered. Not from the cold air, Amit realised, for such a thing had never inconvenienced a primarch, but in anticipation.
The thought was dizzying. To make his primarch tremble from just his touch. To be wanted. To be loved.
He pressed another kiss to the straining erection, brief and modest. Pausing there, he breathed in the scent of his gene-sire. It was at once utterly inhuman and intimately familiar.
Then he flicked his tongue along the underside of the cock and pressed the flat of his tongue against the head. Letting himself taste for a few seconds. The salty taste was like blood and not, calming the thirst while making him salivate for more.
It took a moment’s intense focus to retract his fangs. They moved more easily than he’d expected. The ache in his mandible was foreign, the feeling of running his tongue over his upper teeth and meeting no obstacles to its passage. He’d known in theory that he could do it, that those ivory knives grew longer before the kill and could surely be shortened as well, but he’d never had a reason to attempt it before. No one he’d sated this softer flesh-hunger with had ever expressed a desire to put their cock between the fangs of the Flesh Tearer.
Now he parted his lips around the head of his primarch’s cock.
He'd heard Sanguinius give speeches to thousands, whisper encouragement to a junior officer presenting her first report, roar in battlefury, cry over dead sons, sing softly to himself. But the soft hitch of Sanguinius' breathing, the almost inaudible moan, was the first time he heard his primarch in pleasure.
The thrill of getting it right sent a rush of delight through him. He planted his hand low on Sanguinius’ belly to feel the soft swell and ebb of each hitched breath. His other hand, careful to keep soft skin from catching on weapon-calluses, cupped his primarch’s most tender parts. A shiver of pleasure whispered through him at the intimate connection, the trust.
Amit didn’t think of himself as an artist. He had never been inspired to create. But the rising heat under his fingertips, the healthy flush drawn across marble skin just by his touch, felt like shaping something beautiful.
He swallowed around the warm flesh in his throat and thought for a moment of the charnel feast. But here was no unnatural hunger driving him, no unthinking beast raging to bite and tear and violate. This was a human thing, for all that neither of them were human. In this moment, he was not a monster, not even a weapon, but a man. His body was used for pleasure, not violence, soft touches teasing out gasps and murmured affirmatives.
When their primarch had first been recovered, the scattered elements of the Ninth Legion had demanded, begged, traded and stolen every scrap of information about him they could find. Every blink-clicked lithograph snapped by remembrancers attached to the Sixteenth Legion, every torn-out sketchbook page, every florid stance of poetry was projected by strategium hololithics across the fleet and studied as intensely as a tactical terrain map. Two things had been immediately obvious: the way in which their primarch looked like them, or they like him, a thousand mirror-images reflecting their gene-sire — and the one singular, conspicuous way in which their primarch looked like no one outside of ancient Catheric myth.
Amit had read up on avian flight, compared images of his primarch to old scraps of film from before the anthropogenic mass extinctions on Terra, studied wingspans and feather shapes, calculated formulas for lift and thrust in his head. At first for reasons of tactical planning, wanting to understand how his primarch might manoeuvre during battle, how to best deploy his company in support. Later, as the years dragged on, just to feed the flame of hope burning in his chest, that he might live long enough to see his primarch soar above.
Scanning the ancient texts for useful data, there had been one piece of information, entirely without military value, that had stuck in his memory: eagles mate in flight.
The angel’s great pinions were outstretched and trembling. When Amit sucked on the cockhead in his mouth, running his tongue over the ridges and probing the tender hole, the cell filled with the shivering sussurations of feathers. When he relaxed his throat to swallow the whole length down to the root, the wings flared open with twin cracks of displaced air.
Sanguinius made a strangled, bit-back noise and folded down over him in helpless muscle reflex, pushing impossibly deeper into the tight channel of his throat. They were entirely joined. Amit’s face was buried in soft golden curls, his forehead resting against flushed skin. He could see nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing but his primarch. His jaw ached from being opened so wide, but it was a sweet pain. When he swallowed again around the hard length choking him, he felt more than heard the answering moan.
Amit pulled off slowly, coughing once as the cockhead caught at the bend of his throat, and looked up with his lips wrapped around just the tip of it.
Sanguinius looked back down, his cheeks flushed, a soft warmth in his eyes. “You’re doing so well, Nassir,” he said fondly.
It was too much. He couldn’t bear more gentleness than he’d already been shown. There would be time, later, to explore this. To relearn human softness, to heal the parts of him cut away in the process of forging him into a weapon.
For now, Amit pulled away from the cock in his mouth, dragging his teeth over the velvet skin hard enough to cause a twitch.
“Don’t tell me, lord,” he growled, flashing a grin straight out of the Twelfth Legion’s gladiator pits. “Show me.”
Sanguinius’ mouth curled up crooked. He cupped the back of Amit’s head, anchoring him. Amit resisted for a second, pushing into the touch just to feel the strength of his primarch, the flesh-hunger testing the control even of mighty Sanguinius.
Then Sanguinius fed the hot, hard length of his ardent desire between Amit’s lips and growled. It was a deep, inhuman predator’s snarl, lips peeled bath from what the Legion’s remembrancers had euphemistically named his angel teeth — a predator's teeth, ivory knives as beautiful and precious as the rest of him and as deadly. Amit felt his own fangs, the primarch’s gift to his Legion, ache in response. And the thirst, the primarch’s flaw—
They had spoken of it on that first day, after the first battle, the first time Sanguinius had seen his sons in red from their chins down. They had turned away from him, ashamed. He had called them back. He had taken the silver goblet from Legion Master Ossuran’s hands and emptied it down to the dregs, the blood of an enemy general staining his perfect lips.
“Do not be ashamed,” he had told them. “This is my fault. My flaw. You are made in my image, your geneseed from my genetic matrix. What you feel, I feel.” He had laughed ruefully at that. “I didn't actually understand until I left Baalfora. The clans who adopted me were a desert people. We were always parched, hunting for every life-sustaining drop of liquid found among the rad-dunes. I thought it was just... thirst. When I killed the enemies of my tribe, I indulged freely. It wasn't until my father took me from the desert that I realised no matter how much water I drank, how much I poured over me, submerged myself in, it would never be enough to quench my thirst.”
— the primarch’s flaw, except it wasn’t. They hadn’t understood before, none of them, not even Sanguinius himself, but Amit saw the truth of it now. The world had changed, and with it his perspective.
It wasn’t a flaw. It wasn’t a curse, but a blessing. The primarch’s true gift: rage burning bright enough to see his Legion through the ash-choked days of vengeance that were coming. Thirst deep enough to keep them killing until nothing was left to kill. The Warmaster had gone mad and half the galaxy with him, and so they would go mad too. They would feast on the flesh of those who had been their oath-sworn allies, rip out the throats of the men they’d called brothers. And on the other side of madness, on the day the traitors were all dead and the thirst was finally sated, their angel would cleanse them of sin with his blood, and it would be the end of the rage.
Even now, it was all Amit could taste, the rich cobber of primarch blood slicking his throat. Sanguinius rolled his hips, thrusting deep into that wet, sucking warmth, trusting Amit to take him. Every stroke added the salty taste of precum on Amit’s tongue.
Sanguinius’ breathing stuttered. He exhaled softly, and the fast cadence faltered. Amit looked up. He wanted to see what his primarch looked like when he fell apart, When Amit made him fall apart. He sucked harder.
Sanguinius made a desperate sound, and tried to pull away. Amit didn’t let him. He grabbed the back of Sanguinius’ thighs to pull him flush against his face. Where his primarch moved, Amit followed, permitting no escape from his hands or his mouth.
Sanguinius could have pulled free, if he wanted. He only called Amit’s name, breathless and rough, and hot spend shot into Amit’s mouth, pooling on his tongue. He savoured it before swallowing, hot and salt and yet nothing at all like blood.
His omophagea twisted in his chest. Sensations slammed into him, reality fuzzing out. He looked down on himself from above, saw his own face slack with bliss, felt the deep pleasure, the deeper love, the fierce joy. He was Sanguinius experiencing these last moments, feeling everything his Primarch felt. Ecstasy so intense it was almost pain surged through him. The beating of his twin hearts seemed to merge to a single, deafening pulse, and the world disappeared in red heat. There was only tight, pulsing release and animal pleasure.
When he came back to himself, powerful hands were holding him up. Amit blinked up at him, hazy and heavy-lidded. He was on his knees, his face pressed against the smooth skin of the primarch’s thigh. No longer Sanguinius, just Nassir Amit, breathless and aching, both hearts still pounding wildly in his chest.
Sanguinius’ wings had come around him, mantling. It felt like they were shielding him from the rest of the galaxy. Sanguinius’ hands were still on him, softly petting. For a moment, there was nothing else but the sweet post-orgasmic languor. For the first time in his life, in any of his stolen lives as long back as he could remember, Nassir Amit knew peace.
“Thank you, lord,” Amit said. “For— for everything.”
Sanguinius furled his wings and helped him stand, offering him a smile that was almost shy. He pressed a kiss to Amit’s forehead with a loving father’s infinite beneficence, and then to his mouth, tongue slipping hot and wet between Amit’s parted lips to taste the mingled iron-and-salt of blood and come.
To Amit, it tasted like forgiveness.