A Cold God, Chapter 36

Our meeting was held in the place that belonged to us alone, a hollow that no other will could intrude upon. It was the heart of the end, the still-point where time and matter thinned to nothing and only those bound to me could endure. There were no walls, no air, no shape. Yet here my twenty Astartes gathered with me, though our bodies lingered inert inside the Capsule. We did not wear flesh in this place. We had no faces, no limbs, no breath. We were presence only, cut from the same dark cloth, stitched into the same silence. And yet, we knew each other. Recognition flowed not through sight or sound but through some deeper resonance—threads of being that had no name, resonances no living tongue could carry.

It was less a council and more a communion. For the first time since I had walked the void alone, I did not stand in solitude. There were others here, and they were mine. The endless black no longer echoed hollow.

Zalir was the first to speak, though to call it speaking was only a concession to language. His voice was no voice, but a weight that moved through the dark. 

“The ninety-nine percent failure rate for aspirants is generous,” he said. “The truth is harsher. More failed than any record dares admit. There were millions who came forward. Millions who swore themselves ready to bear your gift, father, millions who thought themselves strong. But only twenty stand now. Only us.”

I let the silence hold a moment longer, then set my thought into it like a stone dropped into a still pond.

“Has there been any explanation?” I asked. “Any common vein among you, my sons, that allowed you to survive the implantation of my gene-seed? Some trait or origin?”

“No,” came Aleksi’s reply, his presence hard-edged, sharpened like ice breaking along a frozen river. “Or, at least, none that we know of. The Emperor and Malcador both pulled samples from our bodies, opened our bones to collect marrow, took little chunks of our organs, sifted through our minds, searching for a thread that bound us. They found nothing. If there is a reason, it lies buried deeper than their reach.”

“Unfortunate,” I said. There had to be something that allowed them to survive. It couldn’t have been just blind luck. However, without further data to really check that, then I was left with nothing to do and nothing to learn. Hopefully, someone will find out eventually. Until then, it’ll have to remain a mystery.

The silence bent again, as if waiting. Time to move onto another topic, then. I broke it. “Compared to the other Legions, how quickly can the twenty of you take a world?”

That was the measure of a Primarch’s brood, was it not? To scour stars, to grind resistance into ash and stone, to leave worlds cowed and remade beneath the Imperial Aquila. I bore no hatred for that duty, no love either. It was simply a path set before me, and I would walk it until the ground ended. I’d already sworn allegiance to humanity and to the Emperor, and I would not turn away from my vow.

Shudani answered. “Father, conquest is not often our charge. We are not sent to win compliance or to bring banners to a throne-room. That work belongs to the others. When the Navy finds a world too deeply entrenched, when the Army finds a foe that bleeds them white, then the call is given. That is when we are summoned. Ours is the task of erasure. To render green worlds into ice and stone. To break suns from their warmth and bury skies beneath winter.”

The silence stirred again, his thoughts pressing colder as he continued. “A single planet falls in a single day. That is the usual span. A world that girds itself with fortresses, a civilization that spans its whole system—those take longer. The largest civilization we’ve had to conquer occupied five planets in the same system and it took us two months to grind them and their fleets to dust. Naval warfare was a bit of a challenge, but we adapted nonetheless. But the end was the same. Cold and lifeless. Their own dead turned upon them as our wights, their strength used to grind the last remnants into silence. And when we were done, their star shone on the corpse of a world.”

I pressed deeper into their memories of that campaign and found the truth laid bare. Naval war had troubled them at first, yes. Against the alien fleets they had been outnumbered, outgunned. But even that problem had not endured. They had reached into the void itself and drawn out its chill, seeding that deathless frost into the hulls of the fallen. Enemy vessels rose again under their command, stripped of will but not of weaponry. To see ships move with no crews, their bridges hollowed and their holds filled with ice, was not something I had ever imagined. I had not even considered it possible, honestly, but then it also made sense; because there really hadn’t been any reason to assume that the only things I could reanimate were the corpses of formerly living biological creatures. I didn’t think that also applied to machines. But, then again, were not all living creatures just biological machines? By the same logic, any dead machine could be reanimated. My sons had, and they had done it without hesitation.

The extermination of that nameless race was otherwise unremarkable in its ease. They had not even cared to recall the enemy’s name. What mattered was that resistance existed, and then that it did not. Some battles dragged longer than others—planets dotted with fortresses, moons layered with bastions, fleets and armies rallied again and again to stave off the dark tide of living corpses and cold ships. Yet every defense fractured when my sons set foot upon soil and pulled the warmth out of the land.

Verdant worlds withered. Rivers froze solid, oceans sealed themselves under plates of black ice. Cities stilled as their own dead rose to tear at their barricades. Entire civilisations unraveled within hours, sometimes days, and nothing endured. I watched it all unfold in memory as though from the eyes of a shade, each world’s color extinguished, their star still burning over a planet that no longer breathed.

So that was the purpose of my Legion, then. Not the hammer to break the foe. Not the spear to pierce their heart and open their defenses to allow others to strike true. No, we were the simplest and most efficient solution next to breaking a world outright. The option before the final option. Exterminatus was not a favored method in the Imperium and ours stood beside it—different, but no less absolute.

And yet the ruin we left was not total. The cold we summoned never rooted itself forever. These frozen husks still spun in the goldilocks zones, still clung to the narrow belts where life could take hold. When my sons departed, when the Wights fell into stillness, the ice began to recede. Weeks would pass and the frost bled away under starlight. The rivers thawed. The soil softened. The worlds were wounded, yes, but not ended. And into those wounds, Imperial colonists came, building their towns and forges atop graves still fresh, sowing crops in fields where the dying had clawed at each other for breath.

That was the pattern. A cycle repeated again and again. My sons delivered the silence, and the Imperium filled it with voices of its own.

“What of these White Walkers, father?” Zalir asked. “They are like us, are they not? You shaped them with your own hands. They walk the world at your command. It may be that they are suitable vessels for the implantation of your gene-seed. Their anatomy will be difficult to contend with, yes, but perhaps not impossible.”

“I created Thell when I took a stillborn babe and poured my essence into its husk,” I said. “The first of the White Walkers. He was the root. All the others were made by Thell’s hand, in his likeness. But yes—I have wondered the same. It is possible. We will test it soon. I intended it, in truth, before you even raised the thought.”

Aleksi stirred at that. 

“So we may think of them as brothers, then,” he said. “Born of the same power. Bearing the same gifts. Not so refined, perhaps, but close enough to share in our blood and our burden.”

There was a pause, and in the silence we felt one another weighing the thought. Zalir chuckled. “Not even close.”

“Perhaps, in time. But they should be tested first,” Eeiko said at last. “Not only to see what they are truly capable of, but to grant choice, if there are any among them who wish it, to become one of us, to sail and make giant snowballs in space with us. We will know soon enough if they are worthy to bear the gene-seed.”

“Very well,” I said. “When we return to flesh, we shall begin the trials. Let them prove themselves. If their bodies take the seed, then their numbers will swell our own. If they break, then the cost is little, for they were made for war regardless.”

Zalir inclined his presence, a nod without a head. “The Emperor and Lord Malcador were clear in their judgment, father. Our greatest priority is numbers. Until that is solved, nothing else has weight. Every battle will only remind us of how few we are.”

“Then that shall be our path,” I said. “Numbers first. All else after.”

None of us spoke for a while. In the endless dark we had no need of breath, yet the quiet pressed against us like a tide.

At length I raised my thought again. “Is there anything else?”

“Nothing further,” Zalir answered.

“Then let us return,” I said. “Let us wear flesh once more.”

And with that the gathering dissolved, and the heart of nothingness was empty once again.

We woke within the Capsule. I was the first to rise. The stone and steel about me felt almost alien after the purity of the void, but it grounded me all the same. I stepped outside and, without hesitation, reached inward toward the fragments of myself I had scattered. My Loci. My children made from stillness and frost. I called to them, not with words but with the pull of my will.

They answered swiftly.

Within the day the horizon broke open. Twenty-five figures tore across the frozen wastes, storms trailing at their heels. Blizzards rose with their passing, walls of ice and snow howling behind them like banners of their own making. I watched as the gales collapsed forests, buried valleys, and scoured the stone with frost. The speed of their approach was remarkable. Faster than any man could ever dream of being. Their stride was endless, unbroken, as if they were carried on the tide of winter itself.

Thell led them. Of course he did. To them, he was eldest, firstborn, the template upon which all the others had been molded.

When at last they arrived, they did not hesitate. The White Walkers fell to their knees before me, the storms dispersing into silence as though afraid to disturb the moment. Snow swirled gently to the earth in their wake. Their heads bowed, their pale hair catching the light like fractured glass.

I studied them.

Each bore the same mark of origin: porcelain skin so pale it seemed carved from ice, eyes burning with a deep sapphire flame that did not waver, and hair like spun crystal. Their features were similar but never identical—variations on a single design, repeating, refining. There was nothing human in their stillness. No breath. No warmth. They were the children of a grave made divine.

Thell lifted his head and spoke. His voice split the air. Like icebergs breaking, like mountains of frozen sea tearing themselves apart. A voice no mortal ear could long endure without bleeding.

“You called us, father?”

Even my sons, my Astartes, shifted faintly at the sound. They carried my essence within them and so endured it, but I wondered what a man—any ordinary soul—would think, hearing that voice. Not worship, surely. Not love. They would call it terror. They would flee it.

And yet here he was, kneeling before me. The first. I smiled. “It is about time you meet your cousins.”