Chapter 377: The Emperor's Children: Chapter of the Lion and the Wolf (Part 1)
Oleg opened the leather satchel he brought back to Terra from Fenris, took out the manuscript paper inside, and placed it on the table, aligning the edges , and then pushed it to Melka on the opposite side.
"Remember to buy me coffee, Mei," Oleg said, "I want authentic plant coffee, not those dark shabu-shabu water."
Melka adjusted her Her prosthetic eyes focused on the manuscript paper Oleg handed her, and with the assistance of the Mechanicum's technology, she quickly read the scrawled handwriting of her colleague.
"Of course, no problem." Melka said, "By the Emperor, I really can't stand it... Really, I spent several years getting the Caliban information from the Dark Angels. , not as much as you got from the Wolf King! I feel like a fool who keeps chasing the lion and keeps losing it..."
"Hey, keep your voice down. This is the First Legion after all. What if a winged helmet suddenly emerges from the wall and is eavesdropping?" Oleg lowered his rough voice, "Anyway, the Wolf King is quite happy for someone to take the lion's The story was written."
"Wait, is it really the story told to you by the Wolf King himself?"
"What if you make it up, Mei? A wild wolf can eat a mouthful of meat without you drinking a bottle of motor oil and eye drops.”
Melka rolled her mechanical eyes, glanced at Oleg, and simply folded the manuscript and put it in the box that she had been using for many years. in a rucksack.
“Let’s do this,” Melka said. “Let’s compete in drinking the Space Wolf’s mead to see who drinks more. Since you all consider yourself a Wolf, I suggest you start drinking first. Mouth.”
——
Eric and Laurentum used chain swords to chop down a giant tree. The giant tree fell to one side, and was halfway covered by another dark giant tree. Supported by the branches of parasitic vines, the crowns of the trees are entangled with each other, and the shadows of the leaves sway, rustling and whispering the secrets that only this forest planet can understand.
Eric scratched his beard and thought about how to get the giant tree down so that the trunk lay flat on the ground. Laurentum warned him not to touch and not become the seventh battle brother foolish enough to be crushed under a tree trunk.
When Wolf King Leman Russ passed by, Laurentum was already pressed under the giant Caliban tree about five meters in diameter, with only two branches wearing silver storm gray armor exposed. Legs, give up kicking and wait for rescue.
Eric was using his lifelong ingenuity and decided to saw off the trees on both sides of Laurentum's body first to make it easier to move a small section of wood.
Ruth laughed loudly, waved his hand for Eric to get out of the way, squatted down, and buckled the gauntlets and arm armor of both hands directly into the giant tree. The muscles under the armor tightened, and with a shout, he lifted the giant tree in one breath.
Eric hurriedly dragged Laurentum out from under the tree trunk by his feet. Then, Ruth threw the giant tree down with a bang and clapped her hands symbolically.
"Careful, children," the Wolf King said gruffly, "don't tell me that the heat in Caliban is making you dizzy. Come on, Othern, let's keep looking. How many wolf cubs are there who can't even chop firewood?"
The Wolf King's guard patted the ax on his waist and laughed with the Wolf King: "Should we ask the knight family? Borrow some knights to chop down trees, sir?"
"Oh, which knight are you talking about, the Knight of Caliban?" Russ said, "Let's get out of this forest first! We are almost in the lower world! Being lost really brings honor to the emperor, right?”
At the end of the sentence, Ruth burst out laughing with great energy, showing his fangs.
Caliban is indeed a very evil place. When they looked down from the track, they just felt that there were lush trees and dense vegetation, and some of them should be castles according to the auspicious omen. The ecological environment is very good, and the basic conditions can compete with Olympia, which is carefully cared for by Perturabo.
But when they landed in a clearing and decided to search the entire planet for traces of the Primarch, Caliban began to cause trouble for them. Even if the Space Wolves were born in ice and snow, it would be too much to know the characteristics of the forest landscape, bump into all kinds of evil monsters every day, and even get lost in a living forest.
“This place is literally alive,” Othern said. “When will we see another Primarch?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, who knows? What? Maybe we have to wait until our big brother is ready to see us. How is he doing here? Is it possible that the eldest son of the emperor has become the Knight King? " Leman Russ said, shaking his head.
"Or the leader of a separate Caliban family, I guess."
"I guess it depends on his character. If he is as serious as Perturabo, he is probably a Caliban." Lord, if that is another Magnus, then we might have to find him in a library somewhere."
Russ said, breaking off a few branches in the way, and thought again. Thinking about it, he simply patted his scabbard comfortingly, then pulled out the long sword and chopped the branches in front of him with overkill.
"I'm thinking," he muttered as he knocked off two withered brittle branches with the hilt of his sword, "he is dressed in brocade robes, wearing a crown on his head, and holding dozens of colorful inlays in his hand. I have no problem with the Silmarillion's sharp blade and being as meticulous as Konrad Curze in refusing to let me come within ten meters of him without taking a shower, but it better not be another Horus. When he comes, he can only call the Emperor to take a look.”
When he first met Horus on the Bucephalus, he had an unfortunate face that wanted to monopolize the seat next to the Emperor. And the pair of eyes staring at him were quite unforgettable.
Othern answered happily: "My intuition says that Caliban's knight fortress and monastery cannot breed such people. Maybe our uncle is relatively simple?"
" Hey, who knows. Let’s leave the forest quickly, find a knight’s territory, and ask if there is any family that has suddenly emerged in the past few decades. It would be better if there is a handsome giant who is more than three meters tall.”
Ruth shrugged his shoulders and let out a long sigh.
If it were located in the wilderness snowfield of Fenris, this long cry would sweep across the blue and cold snowfield, penetrate the icy wind, and transmit the cold and long howl to the stormy silver covered with white snow. The end of the mountains. But here is Caliban, with towering green trees, dense thorns, and thousands of vines entwined with each other. Evil beasts are densely packed in the depths of the shadows, making the deep and stagnant shadows ready to move.
Therefore, the most likely result of his behavior is to make the mist in the forest move automatically without wind, attracting the deep snoring of any animal.
Ruth expected this, and even looked forward to it. After wandering in the forest for a long time, his sword and ax were really hungry for something new.
“For the noble eldest son of the Emperor, whether he is a knight king, a lord, a warrior, a scholar, or a winged cherub, let’s kill something, wolf cubs!”
——
The language has not yet taken shape.
The ideas that swirled within one of the greatest and most complex minds of the Imperium had not yet found a way to carry them, to give them form. Words have not yet come into contact with the mind, which is free from hindrances; the words, written by man's limited faculties, to delineate the pattern and appearance of the world, have not yet come to limit this innate faculty of perception and description.
Therefore, everything that follows is a boring cross-section of the real world, painted with barren brushwork and limited colors after language was given to him.
The outlines of the trees are like rough, wrinkled paper, and the light that briefly shines into the dense forest appears as a fragile strand. The sky is almost invisible in the deep dark green shadows. When it occasionally appears with light, it is a transparent bright blue like broken glass, which seems to be separate from the thick green tree shadows on the ground. In more places, cold dark light seeps out from around the trees themselves, passing among the green shades, shrouding the tree trunks, weeping vines, tangled grass and rustling insects in a holistic darkness. within the environment.
He was running, grabbing the vines, hugging the tree trunks to turn, locking the direction while breathing heavily, and listening to the endless echoes of roars and cries that the forest gave him.
He doesn’t know where he comes from, has no name, doesn’t care about his identity, and never thinks about the past. He was born to be familiar with the smell of trees and earth, and was accustomed to the vivid feeling brought to him by this seemingly endless forest - a forest that couldn't wait to hunt anything in it, and it thirsted for brutal killing. And this is what he is good at, or in other words, the only thing he can do.
He grabbed a long bone and took it from the beast he killed with his bare hands. The tip was sharpened enough with a flat stone. Combined with his natural strength, he could easily penetrate the thick and dirty fur like a thorn. It penetrates fat like mud, and penetrates muscle like a giant tree.
Then there is blood, which sticks to the long bones of the giant beast with a black luster in the dim light, dripping in series like a stream of life. Finally, in the sultry weather, the dead body will quickly decay , the forest will personally terminate its offspring.
His opponents are everywhere. Small beasts lurk in the shadows, lying on tree trunks, their bright eyes piercing the green light. They will chase the giant beasts and cling to them as the beasts begin to gnaw at their prey, sipping the gurgling fluids and blood of the dead.
The terrain bulged upwards. He used his hands and feet to climb up lightly and quickly against the ground. The mud clawed at his bare feet, and the thorns kept trying to hold on to his ankles. The forest itself is also his enemy, and its malice is also trampled under his feet.
Suddenly, he stopped hesitantly, and the constant whispering in his ears was replaced by a distant roar falling from the sky. Those unfamiliar noises slid across the top of the forest, rumbling to shake his heart, and then left quickly, like the dark clouds before the downpour.
It was a strange thing whose content he had not known in his countless life, and his muscles tensed and his mouth growled alertly, sending out cautious warning signals.
Is that related to the giant beast he is hunting? Is it another trick played by the forest, a deceptive grimace created by a creature to survive and hunt? Or had he just been bitten by some kind of fly lurking under the bark of the tree, causing him to fall into an unknown hallucination?
He held the long bone, crossed the ridge of the terrain, and moved downward carefully to avoid rolling down a large distance at once and falling into thorns and shrubs, causing more scars on his body.
He is hungry and hungry, and his physical strength is not enough. He needs to save it and use every ounce of it to knock down the giant.
The smell began to change, and he sniffed, sensitively smelling the fishy smell and restless heat in the air. It's close, and he needs to be ready.
When the huge beast appeared at the edge of his vision, he changed the way he grasped the long bones, climbed up the branches lightly, and skillfully approached from a high place, becoming one with the noise that already existed in the canopy. It's close, but it doesn't notice.
His throat rolled and he swallowed the hungry saliva.
He wants to drink its blood to replenish the water he lacks; eat its flesh to regain the physical strength taken away by the forest; peel its skin to cover his hairless body; sleep on it. The inside of a corpse with viscera, used for a good rest. Otherwise, he might have to rely on the solidified blood and mud all over his body to survive the increasingly cold weather in the coming seasons.
He is already on top of the beast. He grasped the long bones with both hands and jumped down.
——
"All-father, what kind of mission are you giving me!"
Russ muttered words that matched the rhythm of the Fenrisian music played by the Legion at the edge of the castle. The poets of the Third Dalian Company played tricks and played their horn flutes and bronze trumpets here.
"Where are my brothers? Where are the Emperor's children? Alas, how many rivers have we crossed, how many forests have we crossed, how many fortresses have we visited... Thorston, don't waste your oil Throw the wolf hair on me!"
Tolston rolled away with the poem in his arms.
Ruth continued to hum his tune, leading his group of warriors around the clearing. The color of the wolf's armor is similar to the gray-blue storm sweeping over the ice fields above Fenris. Placed between the deep green shadows of Caliban, it is as strange as if it has run into the wrong place.
In any case, this does not affect the good mood of the wild wolves. Some Caliban beasts taste really good after all.
Several Caliban natives in dark armor came clanging over and performed their local knightly salute to Russ. Russ waved his hand casually in response, leaned forward and asked: "What's the matter, little warriors?"
"My lord, we found a legend from the old manuscripts that matches your description. There are just some small problems in it..."
As soon as Leman Russ heard that there were problems, he could guess that the legend was probably somewhat different from the "inspiring local legend" he was looking for. big.
He laughed loudly and turned the barbecued leg on the iron weapon rack: "Okay, let's talk about it."
"Legend has it that in the ancient kingdom of knights, the land was occupied by various spirits and ghosts, and the human tribes lived a difficult life, until a king left the settlement on horseback and went to the forest to seek enlightenment..."
"It's a bit interesting. ," Russ commented vaguely, waving his hand to silence the Space Wolves.
“In the early morning, a miracle came, ripples appeared on the mirror-like lake, and an extremely beautiful girl walked out of the lake. She was the kind-hearted fairy of the lake, blessing the Knight of the Holy Grail..."
"Huh? No, isn't it...ahem..."
"Can you stay away from me with your coughing of being choked by barbecue, Thorston?" Wolf? Wang said disgustedly.
There was a low laughter among the wolves.
The knights of Caliban also snickered in their helmets and continued: "After receiving the blessing of the fairy in the lake, the knights held high the flag of the goddess and won one battle after another. The virtues of knights established the first kingdom in Caliban's history."
After finishing speaking, the Calibans bowed comically and tried to imitate the appearance of the knights in the legend painting book: "This is it. The legend that best meets your requirements, my lord.”
“There are miracles and warriors. It doesn’t sound like something that humans can do...but the timeliness is a little lagging, and the gender...wait, What if our eldest brother is as beautiful as Fulgrim and Caliban admits his mistake?”
The wild wolves shook their heads and sighed.
After Russ finished speaking, he picked up the sizzling roasted leg and tore off a large piece in one go, with a satisfied smile on his weathered face.
"Okay, warriors, after all, the Emperor's eldest son may not be in these dark castles. Next we really have to go back to the forest to look for him."
Space Wilderness The wolves howled suddenly. They had had enough of Caliban's jungle.
Ruth narrowed his eyes and said with a smile: "Stop howling, let's go find the fairy in the lake, but we have to leave a good impression on the goddess, right? Pack your things and get ready!"
(End of this chapter)