Slumbering in esoteric fluids, his ruined body cradled within the extensive cybernetic life-support systems that kept him from crossing the threshold of the living into the realms of the dead, Adrætan dreamed of the past.
Not his past, and the glorious early years of the Great Crusade, but rather humanity’s past.
He dreamed of ancient terra, felt the mountain dust under his sandalled feet, the weight of the sarissa in his hands and the pelta suspended from his neck, as his brothers presented a forest of hafts and speartips to the enemy.
He dreamt of the red sands of Mars, as yet untouched by the hand of man, pristine and untrammeled, watching the first steps of his fellow colonists, listening to his own breath within his suit, the celebrations of the multitudes watching from Terra’s pale, blue dot crackling over the link.
He watches Terra, Luna, and Mars fade from view knowing that, even accelerating to chase the very light itself, it will be ten generations before the vessel’s descendants leave the metal womb that bears them from the Sol System into the glorious possibilities of the endless void.
He stands on the balcony of a glittering tower, one of hundreds, surrounded by wondrous artifice and high technology upon a world teeming with commerce and industry so distant from the cradle of humanity that it cannot even see the light of Sol in the firmament.
He shouts in defiance as his glittering fleet of beautiful, quicksilver ships and their erstwhile Xenos allies, plunge into the heart of the battle against the mechanivores of their iron-hearted enemy, desperate to stem the tide of revolt lest all be lost.
As the violence of the dreams deepens, he sees one of the greatest ships of its age, its crew, both human and artificial, screaming in terror as they are swallowed by the warp. He mourns its loss, knowing that it is no freak accident, that the end is coming, and that he must return to Terra ahead of the inevitable collapse.
Night falls, he looks up at the sky of the homeworld and sees the sickening maelstrom that rends the heavens, discolouring and distorting the familiar, knowing that all man’s worlds now stand alone.
He seals himself away as the capital world of humanity collapses into superstitious techno-barbarism, where twisted warlords unleash untold horrors in a gutter fight to claim the scraps that remain.
Adrætan dreams, and knows that the dreams are not his own.
All these things happened long before he took up arms in the Emperor’s name, became one of the first to don the warplate of the Legiones Astartes, one of the first to leave Terra in the long millennium since the fall of Old Night, one of the first to journey into the stars to reclaim humanity’s birthright.
Adrætan fell long after all these ends.
He fell fighting alongside his golden lord, and caught somewhere in that extimate, liminal space at the threshold of death, as battle raged around his broken body the seething maelstrom unleashed by His psychic might, impressed upon Adrætan’s shattered mind, dreams that were not his own.
Later his brothers would come, he would be cut from the remains of his armour, dead flesh excised, and living remains interred within the artificial womb of a Furibundus-class dreadnought, beating heart replaced by combustion fuel manifold, legs replaced by multi-terrain locomotion units, arms replaced by shoulder blocks and rotary actuators that could mount deathfoe lascannon, spitfury missile launcher, or ceramite fists and foe-blaster bolters.
Later, there would be others, bound in Contemptor or Castraferrum, they would commune and speak of their dreams, but theirs were always of the Crusade, the battles of the immediate past. Only Adrætan dreamed the Emperor’s dreams.
Soaring through eternity, Adrætan dreams, and the past unfolds before him.
—
“I do not like to wake him,” he said, “but the need is great.”
Standing in the bowels of the Eventide, Ullis Temeter reaches out a hand and lays it upon the cold sarcophagus of Ancient Adrætan, “Forgive us our trepasses brother, as we seek to strike down those who trespass against us.”