799.M30
LOCHOS, OLYMPIA
As the last drops of rain cleared away from the sky the fresh moisture was drunk eagerly by the thirsting Earth, turning it almost inky. In the morning it would return to its sandy hue, but until then, the sharp scent of petrichor on the arid ground hung around the mountains.
In the tranquil hours of the final watch of the night, the air was crisp and refreshing as it carried the promise of a new day. Along a weathered path, where the earth had become firm and dry with the passage of time, a young boy was being led on a journey to a place called Lochos.
As he moved forward, he was flanked by a quartet of imposing figures clad in shining white-and-gold armour. Two men were walking ahead of him, clearing the way with alert precision, while two others brought up the rear, ensuring that he was well-guarded from all directions. The atmosphere was thick with anticipation as they made their way through the quiet night.
If the boy hadn't been bursting with unwavering confidence, he might have viewed himself as a captive in their hands being led to his doom.
The men had been told their purpose was to guard the boy and escort him safely to their King.
It was a convenient fiction, and one none of them examined too closely at first. The child was young, unarmed, and walked barefoot upon the wet stone without complaint. He did not resist their presence, nor acknowledge it beyond a cursory glance. This, they told themselves, was normal.
Yet as they descended the mountain path, Miltiades became aware of a subtle reversal.
The two warriors in the lead continued to scan the road ahead, but their vigilance lacked conviction.
Their attention drifted backwards, again and again, toward the boy. Not out of concern — but appraisal. The same instinct a veteran applied to a new commander whose measure had yet to be taken.
The boy had given his name earlier, stating it simply, without ceremony or pomp.
Perturabo.
He spoke rarely after that. When he did, his words were precise, stripped of excess. He did not ask questions as a child might, nor did he offer speculation. He observed. When he spoke, it was to confirm.
Miltiades told himself this was affectation — a clever youth mimicking authority learned elsewhere. But the explanation rang hollow even as he formed it. There was no strain in the boy's manner, no effort expended. He did not perform the command. He behaved as though it were his natural condition.
The men maintained the pretence.
They walked as guards. They positioned themselves as escorts. They addressed him with the deference appropriate to a foundling of interest, nothing more.
Yet none of them believed the shape of the arrangement. Not truly.
Miltiades felt it most keenly.
He had held authority for decades. He knew its weight, its limitations, its fragility. The boy carried none of that burden — and yet authority clung to him all the same. Not enforced. Not demanded. Simply present.
When Perturabo spoke, the men listened.
Not because he compelled them — not overtly — but because it seemed prudent to do so. As if ignoring him would constitute an error, the consequences of which could not yet be defined.
Miltiades found this deeply troubling.
The road wound on toward Lochos, the last watch of the night thinning into the early morning mist.
The city lay unseen beyond the ridges, vast and patient.
Behind the masks of discipline and routine, the men began to understand something they did not yet possess the words to express.
They were not escorting a mere boy.
They were accompanied by something more, almost dare he say, from all the things he heard of the boy, it seemed he was of the divine, from beheading a beast, avenging a shepherd's son that had been eaten, to hunting wild beasts across Olympia, to being supposedly a master craftsman.
The light in the sky turned from grey to pale gold, and the overwhelmed stars withdrew.
Even the star maelstrom faded to a livid bruise. The boy seemed glad of it.
Night clung on in the valley, and the deeper they went the darker it became. The air thickened with shadow, as if the darkness were gathering there for a last stand in defiance of the strengthening day.
Colour seeped into the world.
From the villages and farmsteads clinging to the slopes, the sounds of waking families carried far in the rarefied air. The houses were built in precarious places, atop rocks and crags.
From this, and from the elaborate terracing and soil traps that filled the hills, Perturabo measured the importance the inhabitants attached to every inch of arable ground.
The road fed into the highway. Close-fitted stone made a smooth surface, along which plodded occasional carts drawn by draft beasts.
It was still quiet, and the party made good progress down the valley.
The road met a white river and continued onto a dyke beside it, made from rocks carefully fitted into the spaces between flood-dumped boulders. A short while later, the road crossed the river via a broad bridge.
On the far side, it immediately began to switch back up a steep rise that quickly became a sheer cliff, unmarked by man's hand save for the laboriously cut loops of the road.
The walls of Lochos grew from the mountaintop. They were fashioned from slabs of sandstone so closely fitted that they formed a seamless whole, indivisible from the rock upon which they stood.
Yet though they grew from the peak and were of the same material, the walls were as different from the mountain as the boy thing was from the men. In art and majesty, the walls exceeded the mountain.
They surrounded the peak, conquering it — the artifice of man surpassing that of nature.
In this regard, the boy and the fortress were the same.
Miltiades looked back at the boy, pride evident in his voice.
"The walls of Lochos," he said. "Unbreachable and unbroken."
"Nothing ever lasts forever," said Perturabo.
Miltiades scowled in frustration at not being able to get one over the boy.
The road climbed in precise zigzags. A central channel took water and provided a track for the braking poles of wagons.
The incline steepened, and ridges of precisely shaped setts broke the surface to provide traction. Small bastions guarded every switch near the summit.
A semicircular plaza carved directly from the rock fronted the great gatehouse. The gates were thick wood sheeted with bronze and faced with hard spikes of iron. Two giant towers guarded them.
Miltiades stopped in front of the gates and rapped upon a tiny postern set into the rear of the left-hand tower. It had been placed at an angle awkward for rams, and when it opened it revealed a narrow stair guarded by an iron yett.
Perturabo saw a weakness there.
"Back so soon, sub-option?" said the guard. He wore a uniform that differed from Miltiades' garb and spoke to him insolently.
His face changed when Miltiades stepped back and held out his arm to indicate Perturabo.
"Inform the palace," said Miltiades. "We have them." He stops for a moment almost struggling to speak. "The guest."
So did Perturabo first come to Lochos. The city was still waking as they marched up its steep, winding streets. Night workers and those whose trade forced early rising went to and fro.
Perturabo had never seen so many people, at least, as far as he remembered, though he had never lived in a Metropolitan City but a town.
He had somehow found himself upon a cliff. He had climbed it as it seemed better than going down. He had then met Miltiades and his men.
That was how he had found himself in this new world, and if he wasn't wrong, a Primarch, the Lord of Iron himself, and his poor parody of ancient Greece, Olympia and now it was time to push the existential dread to the back of his mind to be dealt with later.
The city might hold more answers and also distract him.
It did far more.
There was a pregnant air over its buildings, the sense of thousands of dreamers returning to the waking world strongly fascinated him that he could almost dare to say taste or feel their emotions; he could push and see more, but he wouldn't. This requires more attention than he has at this time.
The city stepped up the mountain in tiers, with the palace filling the levelled peak, but the walls were truly monumental, rising higher than the lowest three levels and casting them into shadow while the sun warmed the stone outside.
Perturabo and his escort went along the main way, passing tight streets between small-windowed tenements.
Every so often market squares opened up, full of traders chatting as they set out their wares. At regular intervals, there were giant cisterns crowded by servants bearing water pots on their heads, while near the top levels rose huge temples and other edifices roofed with gleaming bronze.
The palace outshone them all. A huge plaza surrounded its walls, and three domes crowned its towers.
The gates were decorated with glorious reliefs in gold and silver. A glance at the windows, and their ratios of construction, the load upon them and the mathematics needed to calculate both and more were Perturabo's to command, which surprised him. He feels so different from before, though his brain seems so far more advanced, if that's even the right word to describe it.
There was so much to see that he had never seen before, but much was familiar. He knew it all: the materials, their properties, and the effects the architect had intended to instil. It was all impressive, but the appeal was lost when his brain had shown another way to make it better and more impressive.
Even so, the palace impressed him with the way it overlooked the city. It looked out over the roofs and
the wall to the plunging view beyond.
On the far side of the fertile lands, he saw the scrubby upland he had gained at the end of his climb. Beyond that was a wide void, blue with pollen, smoke and dissipating mists.
Far away on the other side, more mountains rose. In every direction, there were mountains stained orange by the young day, their flanks stepped with ancient quarries, their pinnacles crowned with forts. It seems even his eyesight has improved.
Hetiades drew Perturabo's attention back to the palace.
The great gates of silver and gold groaned wide, and the palace opened itself to him.
The tyrant was awake and ready. He had been expecting the youth. Ranks of gold-and-white armoured men lined the marble hall, filling the gaps
between its tall columns. Their faces were stern in their open helmets. Flambeaux competed with weak electrical illumination, but they were all being
overwhelmed by the light of the sun.
Two titanic statues stood on either side of a huge throne, their right hands held out in natural, lifelike poses. The totems they clasped in their left fists, and the robes that adorned their heroically muscled bodies, were rendered in iron.
Upon the throne between these two huge figures, the tyrant sat. He was small and middle-aged, a crown of stylised iron pine needles on his head. A pair of golden sceptres nestled casually in the crooks of his arms; here was a man who
wielded his power with seeming carelessness.
At first glance, the tyrant was not an imposing sight, being spare-limbed with the hump of a round stomach clearly visible under his chiton of imperial purple.
His black hair was sparse, and the style he wore it in, brushed up to feather his scalp, only accentuated its lack. His nose was prominent, and his eyes close-set. Indeed, he seemed to have been poorly fated, for the men he surrounded himself with were lithe and clean-limbed and handsome of face, while the patricians gathered in a crowd before his throne were taller and more richly dressed than he.
But his courtiers seemed pompous in comparison, like peacocks around a hawk, and though his throne was scaled monumentally and should have engulfed him, somehow the many tonnes of masonry around the tyrant served to aggrandise the little man rather than diminish him. The statues to his left and right were superficially more impressive than him, but they were ridiculous in their size.
There was no power in their pupil-less eyes. They were blind, and stone dead unless you bound a Daemon or imbued it with the Warp but for the moment it is dead.
Dammekos, the Tyrant of Lochos, was vital. A great will was caged in his modest flesh, and from behind his plain face a sharp intelligence looked out upon the world. He masked his eagerness at the party's approach, but Perturabo saw it all too clearly, and suspicion stirred in his breast as to what this man desired of him.
The men and their charge halted at the dais of the throne. Miltiades grasped Perturabo's shoulder and pushed down to force the boy to kneel. Although he was a head shorter than the sub-option, Perturabo was as immovable as bedrock, and resisted without effort.
Dammekos waved Miltiades away irritably, too excited by his guest to care for the niceties of deference. Miltiades stepped back, and he and his three men knelt.
A herald came forward.
"All hail Dammekos," he called in a clear, beautiful voice, "eighth of his name, Tyrant of Lochos, third of the twelve Tyranthikos, Lord of Irex, Kerroitan,
Domminiki, and the Septologies of Alka. All hail Dammekos!"
The soldiers in the hall stamped once The herald stepped smartly back.
Dammekos adjusted his sceptres.
'Well then, Miltiades, what have we here?' His voice was quick and prying. Not unpleasant, as there was a generous measure of warmth to the words, but his charm could not mask his intellect, nor his greed. "The mythical boy of Chaldicea, I'll warrant. No myth at all!"
"It is he, Tyrant," said Miltiades.
"I admit, I had not expected you to return so early, Miltiades," said the tyrant. "You have outdone yourself. You only set out last night! Weren't you just saying last week how long it would take you to cover Chaldicea to find him? It appears
you were wrong." His courtiers laughed. They whispered behind their hands.
Miltiades looked up. "We found him here, my King, climbing the Phrygean cliffs. We got little further than the Irex road. Shepherds saw him yesterday, attempting the climb. We went to meet him."
"And where are these shepherds?"
"With their flocks, my King," said Miltiades. "Miltiades!" Dammekos scolded affably. "What kind of example are you setting for our guest? Where is your sense of generosity? See to it they are rewarded five lochans a piece."
"It shall be so, my King," said Miltiades.
Dammekos turned his attention directly to the boy. Until then he had been examining him covetously but had not engaged with him, as if Perturabo were a work of art he might purchase rather than a thinking being. Now Dammekos smiled broadly and looked into Perturabo's blue, almost ethereal eyes.
"You must be the boy who has been roaming the Chaldic highlands. You must be," he mused. "I do not see how it could not be you. I have never seen such a finely formed youth. You outmatch the stories."
"I do not know if this person is me," said Perturabo mildly. Now it was Dammekos' turn to be surprised by the boy. The King smiled indulgently at the boy's boldness.
"You do not know?"
"I have no memory from before yesterday. I was halfway up the cliff. I finished my climb. That is all I remember."
"How did you come to be climbing the cliff?"
"I do not know. I remember nothing," said Perturabo.
"My King!" hissed Miltiades. "You will address him as my King!''
Perturabo looked back at the officer. "He is not my King." Dammekos let out a disarming laugh. "Now now, sub-optio, we cannot rebuke our guest for neglecting the proper form of address. If he remembers nothing, how can he know what to say?"
"Then he should learn, my king," said Miltiades. "He is in your hall."
"He will, we can be sure of that. But he is correct. If he does not know who he is, then how can he know me for his master? For now, let us be kind and forgive him for his ill manners. Tell me boy, there have been reports for several months of a
youth of your description coming from the plateau of Chaldicea. What do you know about that?"
"I said I know nothing."
"It must be you," said the king again. "The wanderer who comes down from the mountains. The boy who slays Jalpidae, and who bested a Hydraka with a wooden dub. The child who wields a smith's hammer with the skill of an artist."
Perturabo looked at his hands. The cuts inflicted by his climb had scabbed over already. Impressive healing is definitely better. They were thick and heavy, a worker's hands. Could such hands be artful? Could I even be a Primarch? "I do not know this person," said Perturabo. "Shall we see then?" said the Tyrant pleasantly. He bent forwards in his throne, embracing his sceptres to him. "Shall we find out together if you are this boy?"
"You mean to test me?"
"If you are agreeable to the proposition."
"What if I fail?"
"You will not be harmed," replied Dammekos. "I am sure such a fine example of manhood could find a role here of some sort. You will be cared for."
"And what if I pass?" said Perturabo
The King smiled. "Then we shall see. Pass or fail, in either case I promise no harm will come to you. What manner of king would I be to slay a living legend, one that brings joy to my people? Tyranny is an art. You will not find me an artless man."
"I agree to your test then," said Perturabo. He had nothing to lose, and everything to gain.
The king raised a hand and nodded. A gong sounded. A door in the side of the hall was flung open, and a bald eunuch heavy with flab-coated muscle strode in.
Behind him, six of his fellows dragged a portable cast-iron forge into the room. Great heat radiated from the metal cylinder holding its fires, and an orange light glowed through a grill in the door.
Bellows were set up, along with a quenching
butt. Lastly, an anvil was brought within and placed upon a tree stump. The wood was freshly felled and still yellow, while the anvil's dull grey was as yet unmarked.
Both were new, untested. Perturabo was pleased with the colour.
The eunuchs opened the side of the portable forge and removed a plate from the tapering roof, exposing a bed of fiercely glowing charcoal. The eunuchs pumped the bellows and the coals glowed brighter.
Thin smoke streamed from the short
chimney, winding its way up into the palace's hammer beams. A barrel of iron rods was set beside Perturabo, and a wooden carryall full of tools.
Everyone in the hall looked at him expectantly. Perturabo looked at the King.
"Begin," said the Tyrant.
Perturabo let his instinct guide him. He decided then and there to make a Warhammer a versatile tool and weapon.
He took up a bundle of iron rods and sorted them, testing their weight and their tone by striking them upon the anvil.
He listened carefully to each. He had no idea which ones to choose, so selected those that felt right.
He thrust them deep into the fire without gloves, his hands coming so close to the flames that the King's courtiers gasped, but Perturabo did not fear the flames and did not flinch from them, instead continuing to hold the rods as they took on the heat of the furnace.
"Bellows," he said, releasing the metal. The eunuchs recognised the power in him and obeyed instantly, pumping long, curved bellow irons until the fire roared and the metal turned white.
To draw out the metal, Perturabo put on a thick hide glove, sized for an adult but already tight on his fist. He did not use the pliers offered him, but dragged out the metal in his gloved hand and commenced beating upon it with the smith's hammer.
He worked slowly, methodically. The iron was unyielding; it required the application of heat to change it. Only in this way could its nature be moulded into a weapon.
There was a warning there, perhaps in some philosophical way, but Perturabo did not recognise it as such, being drawn into his work with the total absorption shared by geniuses and the simple-minded alike.
He worked far faster than any smith known to the court, striking the metal as quickly and surely as the steam hammers in the foundries. Showers of sparks rained from the blade taking shape under his hand, skittering away across the marble flagstones.
For hours he worked. The court receded from his attention. There was only the iron on his anvil. With his indomitable will and strength he shaped it, refusing to acknowledge his limitations he forced it to accept its new form and it did with a bow.
Iron was an interesting metal to work with and he has learned much from this experience.
Seven times the hammer went into the fires, came out, was beaten and quenched.
Mists of metallic steam billowed from the water butt, filling the hall and raising the temperature as the morning passed.
Dammekos watched, fascinated.
The rest of the court grew restive, requiring food and drink but unwilling to leave before their master. Neither the Tyrant nor the boy noticed or cared.
One last time the blade went into the water.
Perturabo wiped the sweat from his brow and held up the weapon with its handle.
Dammekos gestured that Miltiades take it.
The hammer was plain and unadorned, lacking fitments, but it was clear that it was fit for its purpose.
"It is perfect!" said Miltiades in amazement. He weighed its balance in both his hands, its weight nearly being more than he can lift "Perfect." He held it up to his lord. "This was done with just a hammer."
Whispers went around the great hall. "It is not finished. No weapon is complete until it is honed." said Perturabo. Another thing he knew without knowing.
"Indeed," said Dammekos thoughtfully. "You may hone it later, in my engineering workshops."
"Thank you. It would…" Perturabo thought for a moment, unsure of how to describe the emotion he felt at the thought of leaving the warhammer not finished, "displease me if I were not to finish my task."
"Commendable, young man." A calculating look came into Dammekos' eye. It saw all of the value of Perturabo, but none of his worth; the nascent Primarch, though new to the world, was sure of that. "Perhaps you might wish to work here, and be apprenticed to our metalworkers? It would be a fine life."
"Perhaps," replied the boy. "But I feel this working of iron is not my true strength."
"Then what is?" Dammekos asked.
Perturabo looked around. He pointed to the gun at the sub-option's waist, a complicated device of bulbous protrusions and flanged edges built around a glass flask crackling with captive lightning. "That," he said. "I would learn its workings. And this…" He gestured at the high roof. "I wish to build, I think. The stone speaks to me, as much as the iron."
Dammekos clapped his hands in delight. "Do you still doubt, sub-option? The boy is he, the wanderer. Well! Well, well, well. Anoinkai's hand is in this, it sure is! He is a gift from God's!"
"Who or what Anoinkai?" asked the boy. "'The goddess of fate," said Miltiades. "How can he be of the gods if does not know that?"
The sub-optio's hand rested on his sword hilt warily.
"What are gods?" asked Perturabo, curious to know what their interpretation of religion would look like if they shared similarities to the Greeks.
"The beings above us, who watch from the summit of Mount Telephus and judge all men. These are their likenesses," said Dammekos, gesturing at the sculptures either side of him. "Gozek and Calaphais, the Twin Tyrants of the God's."
Perturabo looked at the statues doubtfully.
"Has anyone ever seen these beings?"
A shaven-headed man, perspiring in ornate robes, stepped forwards.
A priest thought Perturabo was already dreading this conversation. It was a coin toss whether or not you could debate them or you meet a zealot and that he did not trust, though some in his past life were interesting to talk to.
"They are removed from us by their own design," said the priest. "The divine and the mundane are separate, overlapping spheres that are distinct, but which influence each other."
Perturabo sneered. "A world you cannot see? The existence of such things is illogical. All mortal experience can be encompassed by the rational."
"Blasphemy!" said the priest.
"Make-believe. A modesty curtain for ignorance and false hope," said Perturabo. "I do not like these God's."
"Then if not from the gods, where are you from?" asked Dammekos.
"I…. ." He paused again before using his index finger to point into the sky. A fierce yearning tightened his throat. "Far far away."
"Then stay here, with me," said Dammekos. "You shall learn all we can teach you. I will help you discover your place of origin, but you must serve our city in return."
"In battle?"
"Maybe."
"What of peace?"
"You made a Warhammer. You will build great things and destroy."
"What of peace?" Perturabo repeated. A hot feeling stirred in him. He did not like it. Dammekos smiled unconvincingly. "There will be peace. No one attacks Lochos. They see the walls of our city and they give up in despair and retreat. Lochos has not been successfully sieged in six hundred years! War is necessary my boy, but never desirable. There is always time for peace."
The boy's cold expression froze the tyrant's mirth. Dammekos' smile set on his face. Liar, the boy's expression said.
"What use are walls against someone who destroys them?"
"I have not yet met such a person," said the tyrant, but in his heart he knew that very person was standing in front of him, dripping with sweat from the heat of the forge.
"If you are to serve me, I must know you. Tell me your name."
"It is Perturabo."
"That is not the name of Lochos. What does it mean?" asked the King.
"I will endure." said Perturabo. Without a moment of hesitation.
He looked around the hall, at all the artifice that had gone into its construction, and at the people it encompassed, the clothes they wore and the jewels they displayed.
Their weapons, their habits, their footwear and beyond, that land the people. The world he will discover everything and it will be his.
"I will find everything out."
and It caught me off but here's some ideas I wrote down for some more Warhammer stories.