Shades of Altansar: Dog at Rest

 There wasn’t enough in the canteen to get properly drunk, but Arteban tried his best anyway.

The aeldari squatted on his haunches, leaning against a ruined wall as he tipped the last of the canteen’s contents into his mouth. He ran a finger along the molded seam of the container and stared at the skull stamped on its face.

“Tastes horrible,” Arteban said.

“Isn’t that the point of it?” Another of Altansar’s conscripts drew close, her voice--like his--barely above a whisper. Pranamin kept her militia helm on, canting her head at an angle. She hefted a melta gun. It was unlovely, unmistakably of Imperial manufacture. Just like Arteban’s canteen.

“I can’t believe the seers let you have that thing,” Arteban said.

“It was a compromise. They needed the rest of our fuel for the young lord’s fire gauntlets,” Pranamin said. She hunched over, exaggerating her grip on the weapon. “Look, Ban! I’m a human! I barely have a soul! Very soon, I’ll grow old and fall over dead!”

She let out a nasty, hissing laugh. Arteban rolled his eyes, but didn’t begrudge her. Pranamin and the rest of the Hellrunners had to face down an Imperial tank. It was an apocalypse on grinding treads, scything them down before the seers silenced its guns with their witchblades. She was clearly ready for payback.

“Congratulations on your new toy, Minmin. Now get out of here. I’m trying to catch some rest between catastrophes.”

The Hellrunner twisted a hand in a vile gesture and sauntered away. Arteban sighed. The stuff in the canteen was not up to the task of knocking him out, but maybe it would weigh down his mind enough for a bit of untroubled sleep. There was a lot the aeldari did not want to think about.

He couldn’t fathom what danger this planet posed to the craftworld, or where it fell in the queue of the many existential threats Altansar already faced. That was why they had seers. All Arteban and the rest of the Omen Dogs knew was what they were told, and what they saw.

Here is what the seers told him: the imperial war materiel, concealed in dead drops, would catalyze the destinies of Altansar’s foes. They could not fall into their intended hands. Arteban imagined the usual suspects were involved: maybe helot-cults of the Great Enemy, or the Orks this planet could never quite seem to eradicate.

Here is what he saw: gene-cursed nightmares boiling from windows and rooftops, falling on them in a single-minded fury. A storm of shot that could not possibly have come from just a single warrior. And a four-armed horror that nearly turned Farseer Vatami’s centuries of experience and cultural continuity into stained, leaking meat on concrete-choked earth.

The monster had made a mess of her, for sure. Yasna communed with Vatami for days afterward. They built wraithbone armatures to guide the psychic regeneration of lost limbs and ruined organs. He wondered if eldritch overspill from Yasna’s agonizing, frontier surgery had attracted the attention of the Imperial Guard’s leashed psyker. Arteban tried not to think of the Omen Dogs who would still be alive, if only they had more healers, if only they had reacted faster. If only, if only.

Mostly he tried not to think about the screaming afterward. Not from Vatami: she bore her near-disembowelment in near-silence. The screams came from the wraithlord, rushing to drive away Vatami’s attacker with great sweeps of its blade, even as high yield laser fire wracked its body.

“Mother!” the wraithlord had wailed. “Mother!”

Arteban shook the canteen again and tried to coax out a few more drops.