A Time to Let Go

The Exarch sits upon a weathered stone that crowns the skull of a low hill. A sword lies across his knees, his tall helm rests in the crook of his elbow. A cold morning fog erases the forests and fields in layers of restless shadow. The bright spike of the planet’s star is rising, warming the air, burning off the mist. Soon it will be gone. Then the humans will come and the dying will begin.

“Do we have a chance?” asks one of the younger Aspect Warriors.

“There is always a chance.” It means ‘No.’ To be an Exarch is to dedicate your life to war and only war, and he has seen enough of victory and defeat to know what the morning will bring. He’d known it would end like this one day.

“Then why fight?”

They both know why. That damned, damning Aeldari pride. Over the course of their long lives they collected and stored and treasured so much pain. Each hurt only made them all the more determined to dig in and hold their ground, until at last they found they’d dug too deep, and held just enough ground for their graves.

“Have you fought humans before?”

“Many times. Long ago.”

Shapes curl and twist within the mist, shapes of ghosts and wraiths. Memories. Grasp them and they slipped through your fingers, gone forever. The Exarch’s fingers brush the hilt of his sword. Tracing a pattern there, the invisible outline of a face, a face from the past with a heavy brow and square jaw, too stolid and thick to be Aeldari.

He’d found the human trapped in the fiery wreckage of a crashed dropship. One of their Astartes, huge and armored and yet sky-fallen, earth-shattered. Dying, almost dead, as broken as his ship. The greenskins had been all around, the Exarch had no time for pity or mercy. He’d laid the edge of his blade against the man’s neck. There had been no anger or fear in the man’s face, only acceptance, as though to say: ‘So this is the path my life was leading me on. So be it.’

The greenskin howls had sounded closer, changing in urgency. He’d been spotted. He had to go.

The Exarch had raised the blade. And. Sheathed it. Drawn his shuriken pistol instead and offered it to the human. A gesture of kinship. Two souls dedicated to the same yet opposing end. The Exarch knew what it meant to be devoted to the thing that would one day kill you. Let the human meet his end proudly, with honor.

The human had taken the pistol wordlessly, without hesitation or thanks. Promptly tried to shoot the Exarch with it. The sword had sliced through the man’s neck like monofilament through water.

The Aeldari were not the only ones in the galaxy capable of stubbornness and pride.

Yet where was that noble warrior’s death today? The Exarch knows you are supposed to celebrate such sacrifices, but really, what good had the man’s death done? He was gone, and soon the Exarch would be gone, and there would be nobody left to remember. Their paths had taken them across the forests and fields of life, changing nothing, leaving nothing behind. Like mist. Vapor.

The fog is thinning. Almost gone now, one last plumed exhalation of this planet’s breath.

The Exarch stands with a sigh, brings his plumed helmet down over his head, seats it, checks the seals. He flexes his gauntleted hands, makes a fist, opens it, fingers closing on nothing.

A faint sound carries across the fields from the direction of the human lines, rising and falling in regular rhythm, curling about on itself and repeating over and over in a kind of aural ouroboros.

“What are they doing?” asks the Aspect Warrior.

“Praying.”

“Does their god answer them?”

“No.”

Many, perhaps most of them were going to die, and the Aeldari were going to die, and no amount of prayer would change that one way or the other. Both peoples had come too far, for too long, were too stubborn and proud for there to be any other ending. Prayers were just more wasted words in a morning full of empty gestures.

“We shall make them pay. We will water the fields with their blood, salt the ground with their bones.”

“Of course.” Not that it would change anything. The Exarch sighs. He feels old. So very old. How had that happened? A warrior born, he’d been ever-vigilant, ever-watchful for any sign of the enemy, but he’d been careless, somehow the years had crept up on him unawares and stolen all those memories and enemies away.

He knows then that the vision of the man had been both a warning and a message. If it was too late for him, it was not too late for others to find a different path, one that did not lead into shadow. The Exarch knows what he must do. Just as there is a time to hold on, there is a time to let go.

The Exarch lays the blade of his sword against his forearm and holds it out to his companion, hilt-first. “Here,” he says, “take this, take the memory of it. Bear it from here, find a ship, find a way off this planet, let something survive this wreck.”

The young warrior does not move. “I want to fight.”

“Save your strength. You have a harder fight ahead of you, my friend, against a far more implacable foe.” How to explain? The warrior would fight the long battle of attrition against time and forgetfulness to keep the memory of this day alive. The Exarch pressed the sword into the warrior’s hand, pressed down hard on his hand as though to imprint himself there. “I command it.”

The warrior nods at last, takes the sword and goes. The Exarch sighs in satisfaction. So, this is the path his life was taking him on. So be it.