Archive of Our Own ^beta

On the sunless planet called Nostramo, there is a city called Nostramo Quintus, and somewhere in the bowels of Nostramo Quintus lives a boy.

Out in the frozen darkness of the void a ship is passing by, huge, dark and daunting. In the command deck, flagged by his chosen, behind his lord's seat, a man stands.

The boy is thin and long-limbed, and he has not eaten well in weeks.

The man is taller than any human should be, and underneath his armor his form is densely packed with lean, strong muscle.

The boy has been sleeping behind trashcans, and spends his days scavenging for food, trying to steal, escaping those bigger and stronger, and making coin every which way he might.

The man fights, as is his due, and knows naught else but fighting.

The boy always keeps on him the weapons that he made himself – a blade hidden across his calf under his pants, when he has pants that are long enough, another strapped to his back, made out of a tin can, a tiny knife held behind his ear. These weapons have kept him alive more times than he cares to remember.

The man is known for his fighting prowess across a thousand systems, and he waves around a long spear tipped by a fearsome blade. He owns still more blades for the skinning pits. There is no metal sharpened to an edge that can keep secrets from him.

The boy fights dirty, with nails and teeth and vicious in his desperation.

The man isn't desperate, not that he knows, but takes no shame in fighting dirty either.

The boy at fourteen years of age is thin as a stick, a creature of nerve, sinew and constant hunger. He is as pale as everyone around him tends to be, since there is no sun, black-eyed and thin-lipped. Black shaggy hair forms a widow’s peak over his forehead. There are some telling him he will be handsome, and he does not believe them, but then again they are those paying him, so who knows, really.

The man wears his lanky black hair in a long braid, and he is unnaturally pale as a corpse. His eyes are as black as starless nights, and has inherited them from his father, even though his was the same from the very beginning. It is a face too sharp, all fearsome edges, and the skull mask of his helm that covers it most of the time is hardly more unnerving.

The boy doesn’t smile often, has no reason to smile. The few times it reaches his eyes though, one could almost remember he is still a child.

The man smirks always, because a scar has permanently turned the corner of his mouth upwards, and it never reaches his eyes.

The boy hasn’t had a father that he can remember, and none who cared to leave a name to him.

The man is someone’s favored son. But he still lacks a father.

The boy’s mother is getting by by selling herself. She tries at first to keep her pimps’ and her john’s belts and grasping hands off her young son. In time, she stops trying, too strung out to care. The men don't bother even bribing him with a piece of candy, and by then the boy knows that instead of getting it done to him for free, he can do it for himself, and do it for something more.

"You don’t have to act the shrilla anymore, you know," the man’s father quietly remarks when, one day, he calls for him and he arrives fresh out of a friendly fight with others of his rank, and more than battle sweat is clinging on his body. "You are First Captain, not fourteen years old and having to sell yourself in the streets of Quintus for the price of a meal." The man laughs, a sound straight from the throat that does not warm his face. "I wonder at the classy company you kept, sire, that would get the price of a meal for a simple fuck. Meals were expensive. By fourteen I was all worn out anyways, and I have never charged that much for my ass."

The boy finds himself in danger more than once a day, on estimation. It is the guards, the gangsters and the johns, the rich coming out for sport at night, the meat hunters, the recruiters for the mines, the other feral children and furthermore the throngs of random criminals roaming the streets.

The man hangs the skinned corpses of a forgeworld’s governmental council between marble columns, above the main entrance to their Assembly Hall. A thousand pict-feeds memorialize him grinning with his helmet off, the top half of his face unmoving as he loudly proclaims "Here is the Emperor’s Justice!"

The boy has killed more than once before he reached the double digits.

The man will, one day, memorialize his steps in blood and terror across a galaxy.

The boy subsists on cannibalizing corpses, at times, having to fight other children and grown men for a piece. A single corpse can feed him for a week. Yet, though partaking of his own victims on occasion – when they happen to be rich, well-fed and tender- he doesn’t kill to eat them, as others do.

The man retrieves his hand from the crushed mortal’s skull, a fistful of blood-drenched, jelly-like brain matter clutched in it. He brings it to his mouth and devours it with a happy groan. When he opens his eyes, he faces the man who wouldn't answer him, restrained and trembling in fear before him. "I told you that, if you insisted on not speaking, there were yet other ways. Now you have just made yourself useless."

The boy can’t sleep well. He tosses, turns and sleeps too lightly, and he often has dreams that leave him groggy and exhausted. Sometimes he gets fits, during which he blacks out, and which he afterwards doesn’t remember. He goes as much without sleep as he dares, and dreads that one day a fit will start in public, and he will collapse in the middle of the street – and when that happens, he knows he won’t be waking up.

The man avoids sleep for months on end. His brain is coming apart at the seams under some shattering internal pressure. Once, a young girl cradles his mind in her arms, so he can catch a few hours of blessed sleep. Soon, she will be suffering on his account, and soon he will be killing on her behalf.

The boy has the crows for his sole friends. He feeds them what scraps he can find, talks to them, sometimes, when they let him, he grooms their wings. Their beating is the only sound that can calm his mind and keep his sleep mercifully free of dreams.

The man is called "The Prince of Crows", and he has tamed a pet raven. He is more cruel with him than ever with his crows, and yet the raven perches constantly on his shoulder, and his weight has gradually become a reassurance.

The boy has no friends, only occasional companions and reluctant allies who won’t hesitate turning on each other for a haul of the trash or for a fix. The other people are all his enemies, and enemies can either victimize you or be your victims. He knows, in theory, what trust is, but he has never really met anyone he would attempt to trust.

The man has no friends either, only brothers he suffers more gladly than others. No one is in hurry to befriend him, and he doesn’t trust anyone, and neither is he trusted.

The boy, pants hanging low around his slender hips, is pressed against another gutter punk, in the dark alley behind a booming club. The other boy is dark-haired as well, as pale and as thin, and all hard lines and eyes rimmed in faded kohl, tugging and jerking at him artlessly, being half-lethargic from the hunger and withdrawal. The boy is staring unheeding over his mirror image’s shoulder, straight into the living room of a ground studio –whose window, suicidally is left open – just as a live transmission of the last of the Night Haunter’s rampages comes up. He can’t imagine the Night Haunter being anything else than some ancient, eldritch monster, but the creature whose terrifying speed renders almost a blur inside the screen seems almost a mere boy, like him – malnourished and gaunt, but taller, stronger, endlessly more dangerous. The image freezes, and he’s looking at a pale, dark-haired boy-man, dressed only in a ragged pair of dark loose pants, his naked torso chiseled and marble-hard, powerful arms baptized red with blood up to the elbow, so he appears to be wearing red dress gloves. The boy keeps staring at the picture as he stumbles into a frustrating release, and wishes all the while that it was the Night Haunter instead with his claw-like fingers wrapped around his length, and it was against his fortress-strong chest that he was being cradled, and, surely, resting safe in his embrace.

"I bet your Primarch fucks you like a dog. That’s why you’re so damaged."

"I bet your Primarch doesn’t fuck you at all. I bet he hates all of you too much to even bugger you dry."

"You're gonna talk or are will you get down with the sucking?"

"I will, once I find what I’m supposed to be sucking at. Hope the Nails in your head make it worth my time, Captain, because your own nail seems rather to be a pin."

When the man exits the shower stalls, he is limping, and, satisfied, a smirk raises the corner of his lip higher than usual. It’s his opponent, for some reason, that's left feeling defeated.

The boy is caught one day, the blood on his hands still red and fresh. He is quickly declared guilty, and there is no mercy.

One day, the man will don his own red gauntlets, and he will find himself condemned once more.

The boy is thrown in a dark, damp jail chamber, while his future is being decided upon. His salvation comes unexpectedly, due to an order from Terra itself.

The man is held inside a power cage, stripped of his armor and his arms, all tied up, and he is awaiting execution. His escape is a shock to everyone; except himself.

The boy boards a ship that will be taking him among the stars, away from the polluted skies of Nostramo Quintus. He leaves behind no one who will miss him and no one that he will miss.

The man never returns except for once, and even then, he never sets foot on Nostramo's soil himself. He watches his planet destroyed, bombarded until it explodes in bits and pieces, and then it is no more. He feels no sadness, and he does not mourn.

The boy is very excited for leaving. Among the stars waits glory, and power, and perhaps a family, perhaps from now on he will not be so alone, he dares to think, when everything seems possible.

The man stands steady as his father raves and claws and rends at him, lets him take out upon his son all of his hurt and anguish, and does not flinch under the pain nor his rebukes. Sometimes it seems to him he's trying to protect the Night Haunter against his own will, and he is tired, but he won't ever budge. He silently obeys, when dismissed, and he returns at once when he’s called back. He is alone holding his Legion still together, they say, he is the one holding his father up. He wishes they wouldn’t say such foolish things. He is holding nothing, and he knows well he can hold on to nothing, and everything is slipping from his grasp, even his very sanity.

The boy has long ceased to be a child, and in as long as his memory reaches, he never has been innocent, but as the spacecraft breaks through the gloom of the pollution of Nostramo, and makes for the stars, he is, for a single moment, a child once more. He’s leaving the eternal night, and will not return.

The man emerges from the shadowed night, and all around screams are breaking out, and countless red glowing eyes are haunting the dark behind him, and there is no escape. He stands in midnight clad, leans on his glaive, and through his armor’s vox his voice harshly crackles thus signaling the slaughter, "WE HAVE COME FOR YOU!"

The boy tells himself, he now will be a hero of the Imperium, and he will be the strongest, and the fastest and the best, that he won’t ever hunger or get cold, that he will never be afraid again.

The man long does not care to pretend he is anything other than he is. He doesn't care to lie. "We were murderers first, last and always!"

The boy is barely out of childhood and yet he’s very old.

The man remains untouched by age, and after centuries, nothing has gotten easier.

The boy lives no more.

The man has not yet died.

The boy’s name was Jago Sevatarion, of Nostramo Quintus, Sector Nine.

They call the man Sevatar the Condemned, Commander of the Atramentar, First Captain of the VIIIth Legio Astartes.

The boy is inside the man who sleeps inside the boy in an industrial lot where acid – spits at a wall and the wall burns – rain falls and his knees are skinned and – head splitting apart he needs to wake – he’s hungry and he’s wearing a stolen jacket and it sizzles wake - up wake up under the rain he swings at his brother shattering the skull behind the skull and you must – not let them clutches his knife so he has something his own to hold he has no father has no mother has no future – does no good remembering the past the monsters outside will trick will try have to – wakes up under rockcrete and someone funny has drawn crude stars with marker and a note – THE ONLY WAY OUT IS TO – dead man who is many dead men and doesn’t talk and – blood for the blood – JUMP down the "Invincible Reason’s" upper deck shouting – this is the false emperor's justice – champion cheated always do that’s their way of – his brothers hold him back for the assassin to pass through he holds back his brothers but he is not there he had to be there but he was ordered and he obeyed and– pulls out strips of skin and marvels at the work "good job neophyte" – grey sunless sands walking on teeth – throws Sigismund’s fist and his own bats and crows shout out of their bloody mouths – Raven looks with his black eyes and he brushes his broken wing he broke it just now his broken father is looking at him with black eyes "a traitor and a fool"  but we are all traitors now have no father never knew can’t be an orphan if you never had a father to his men but they fought together and now they are all dead and he will be too if this headache goes on and and he has not slept is all stimmed up this isn’t happening he is awake in the Nightfall among the stars – there are marker stars above him in the grim darkness of Nostramo Quintus which is no more the Night Haunter is licking at his cheeks but he does not cry but oh he's crying bloody tears his Night father cradling him tenderly and safe and blood gushes out of his mouth and nose and his eyes and it is his wake up and he is dead and nothing is real all this will be not pass cannot not be changed you are a man son of your father you don’t have and have no mother and have no one and stand in midnight clad –

The boy opens his eyes to the gloomy darkness and cracked rockcrete and to a sea of cruelly mocking marker stars.