#Ullis Temeter

[inquisitor-gayfax]

40K Bingo Ficlets - 1/3

The first of my three ficlets for the 40K bingo challenge be upon ye!

This first one is something I've had kicking around for a while, a gift for @i-cant-believe-it-s-not-grimdark based on her excellent Huron-Fal/Temeter fic Borrowed Time!

Despite requesting hopeful prompts, looks like 2/3 are going to be sad, whoops!

More details beneath the cut!

Fandom: Warhammer 40.000, Horus Heresy

Rating: G

Category: M/M

Relationship: Huron-Fal/Ullis Temeter

Summary: They say you remember nothing of time spent in stasis-sleep, but Huron-Fal knows better.

Bonus bingo progress:

[i-cant-believe-it-s-not-grimdark]

I finally finished my Warhammer big bang fic about Ullis Temeter and Huron-Fal from Flight of the Eisenstein. It is the longest single work I have ever written, and I'm still kind of in shock that I managed it lol

If you like slow burn romance, fluff, and sadness (I cannot emphasize this one enough), then this fic is the one for you.

Additionally, @wavy-the-knight-does-art illustrated one of my favorite scenes and did an absolutely beautiful job!!

[martialeagle]

An excerpt from Flight of the Eisenstein, by James Swallow

Context: The fourth book of the Horus Heresy series. At the Drop Site Massacre, traitorous Space Marines release virus bombs over the planet Isstvan III, to kill the remaining loyalists in their legions.

Temeter and Huron-Fal were at the shallow ridge before the bunker’s steel hatch, shouting at their kinsmen to run and run, to run and not look back. Temeter felt a pang of fear, not for himself, but for his men. They had responded perfectly to his command, falling back in good order and surging away from the enemy along the trench lines they had already cleared. Hundreds of them were already in the bunkers, sealing themselves in to weather the imminent bombardment, but there were many more he knew would not live to make it to the doors. He looked up again at the sickly sky and Temeter became torn inside. Who betrayed us, he asked himself, echoing the aged Dreadnought’s question? Why, in Terra’s name, why?

‘Ullis!’ barked the old warrior, stomping to his side. ‘Get in there! We have only a few seconds!’ ‘No!’ he retorted. ‘My men first!’

‘Idiot!’ growled Huron-Fal, throwing protocol to the wind. ‘I will stay! Nothing will be able to crack my hide. You go, now!’ He shoved Temeter with his colossal manipulator claw. ‘Go inside, damn you!’

Ullis Temeter stumbled back a step, but his gaze was still on the sky. ‘No,’ he said, just as flickers of brilliant light turned the day a glittering white.

At high altitudes overhead, the first wave of the virus warheads detonated in series, a wall of airbursts instantly unleashing a black rain of destruction. The viral clades, capable of hyper-fast mutational change and near-exponential growth rates, feasted on native airborne bacteria. The thin, dark bloom of the death cloud rolled out over the Choral City, just as the second wave fell. The shells did not explode until they hit the ground, bursting to smother city districts, open fields and trench lines with tides of destructive haze.

The life eater did as it had been engineered to do. Where a molecule of it touched an organic form, it spread instant, putrefying death. The Choral City, every living thing, every human, animal, plant, every organism down to the level of microbes was torn apart by the virus. It leapt boundaries of species in a second, burning out the life of the planet. Flesh rotted and blood became ooze. Bones shredded and turned brittle. Isstvanians and Astartes alike died screaming, united in death by the unstoppable germs.

Temeter saw the warriors running towards him, dying on their feet. Figures fell to the mud as their corpses turned to a red broth of fleshy slurry, viscous fluids seeping from the chinks in their power armour. He knew that he had dallied too long, and he shouted with all his might. ‘Close the hatch. Close it!’ The men in the bunker did as he told them, even as he tasted blood in his mouth and felt his skin prickling with budding lesions. The metal door slammed shut and hissed with a pressure seal, locking him out. Temeter hoped they had been quick enough. With luck, they would not have taken any of the virus inside with them. He managed two stumbling steps before he fell, the muscles in his legs singing with agony.

Huron-Fal caught him. ‘I told you to run, you fool.’

The captain flung off his helmet with a final, agonised gesture of defiance. It was useless now, the virus having moved effortlessly through the breather grille and into his lungs. His hand flailed at the metal flank of the Dreadnought and traced a runnel of dark fluid. Even through the pain, Temeter understood. There was a small fracture in the old warrior’s ceramite casing, not enough to have slowed him on the battlefield, but more than the virus needed to reach inside the Dreadnought’s hull and savage the remnants of flesh inside. ‘You… lied.’

‘Veteran’s prerogative,’ came the reply. ‘We’ll go together then, shall we?’ Huron-Fal asked, embracing Temeter’s body to him, moving swiftly away from the bunker.

It took every last effort from Temeter to nod. Blinded now, he could feel the tissues of his eyes burning and shrivelling in his head, the soft meat of his lips and tongue dissolving.

Huron-Fal’s systems were on the verge of shut-down as he stumbled to a safe distance, skidding to a halt. ‘This death,’ rasped the voder, ‘this death is ours. We choose it. We deny you your victory.’

With a single burning nerve impulse, the mind of the warrior at the heart of the Dreadnought uncoupled the governor controls on his compact fusion generator and let it overload. For a moment there was a tiny star on the battered plains outside the Choral City, marking two more lives lost within a maelstrom of murder.