Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Guardian of the Dragon.

Lin turned the title over in his mind.

There were many dragons in this world — Fatalis, out on the Azure Star, was a dragon; the beast that the Primarch Ferrus Manus slew on his own homeworld was a dragon; even the reaches of Chaos held droves of hell-drakes.

But when it came to dragons on Mars, there could only ever be one.

The ancient star-god who ruled over technology — the Void Dragon, Mag'ladroth.

But the Void Dragon was supposed to lie buried beneath Mars's Midnight Labyrinth, worlds away from Magma City where he now stood. How could the two possibly be connected?

It wasn't an easy question to put to Dalia directly. Lin chose his words carefully and probed from an angle instead: "Why did you attack Inquisitor Vladilena?"

"To keep her from learning secrets she shouldn't. She stumbled in here while hunting for Vashtorr's secrets — knocking her out was for her own good."

"Then will you knock me out too?"

"No. Someone wants to see you."

Lin clicked his tongue, seriously doubting whether whoever wanted to see him still counted as a person. "So you're taking me to meet them?"

"No. I won't let Him see you."

What kind of riddle-obsessed weirdo was this?

Dalia didn't bother clearing up Lin's confusion. She pushed open a door, and only then did Lin realize there was a laboratory behind it.

At her gesture, Lin followed her inside.

He glanced around and immediately recognized the place.

"Koriel Zeth's laboratory."

He didn't even need Miria's guidance anymore. Following the vision from before, Lin wound through several corridors and found a shattered device standing at the center of the hall — everything matched the vision exactly.

"Is that... the Akashic Reader?"

An artifact said to grant knowledge of everything in the universe.

Used properly, it could be worth every bit as much as the Black Library that held all the knowledge of the Eldar.

Lin reached out to touch it, but Dalia caught up from behind and pressed his hand down.

"It only ever activated successfully once, and it's broken now."

He already knew that from the vision. Lin clicked his tongue in regret.

He wanted to ask whether she'd be willing to hand over the wreckage — maybe he could unlock some new technology by taking the thing apart.

But Dalia's next words cut him off before he could ask.

"But I can fix it."

Damn, seriously?

Lin gestured for her to go ahead, sincerely inviting Dalia to put on a show.

Dalia stepped forward. She raised her palm, and a pale green energy leapt to life in her hand, pouring into the ruined Akashic Reader. Driven by that power, the device began knitting itself back together, mending its own damage.

The energy shared the same hue as the Void Dragon's, and it told Lin that the Guardian of the Dragon could apparently draw on a portion of the Void Dragon's own power.

But it was only a fraction of that power, and the Akashic Reader's damage was simply too severe — some parts of it were beyond self-repair.

Fortunately, Dalia knew the device intimately. She pushed harder, and in the end built the unrepairable portions out of pure energy alone.

She could do even that?

Lin found himself marveling at the might of a star-god.

Compared to that Vashtorr out there, who could only cobble together bootleg viruses and slapdash defense models, the Void Dragon's power truly lived up to the name of Omnissiah.

Still, the work clearly strained her. Color drained from Dalia's face, and the power gathering in her hand began to spill outward.

The overflow was faint at first, but it gradually gathered together and, with unmistakable purpose, surged straight toward Lin.

"Whoa, what the hell?"

Lin, who'd just been admiring the 'miracle,' never expected this. He had no time to dodge before the energy smacked him full in the face.

The cold, pale-green energy enveloped him, and in a daze, Lin felt himself dragged into some space woven from that very power.

Lin looked up and saw the Void Dragon imprisoned deep beneath Mars.

Had he really seen it?

Lin wasn't sure. The pale-green energy field and the pixel-like fractures mottling the creature's form kept him from seeing it clearly; he couldn't say for certain whether that vast prisoner was truly Mag'ladroth.

But the thing had clearly seen him with perfect clarity. It rumbled, seeming to speak in some language no ordinary mind could comprehend.

Lin certainly couldn't understand the language of a star-god, but the humiliation of hundreds of thousands of years' imprisonment and a joy like that of seeing a savior both flooded into his mind at once, letting him grasp Mag'ladroth's meaning through raw emotion instead.

"A new rule," it said.

"Creation," He said.

"My savior"

"Hope"

"Failure"

"Disappointment"

"Killer"

"Remaker"

"Destroyer"

"Lin"

He heard all of it in a single instant, hundreds upon thousands of voices tangled together until his head spun and nothing came through clearly.

Lin no longer wanted to keep communicating with the Void Dragon — he just wanted a moment of clarity. But he had no idea how to break free of its grip.

He tried stepping backward a few times in the chaotic space, and to his surprise, he actually stumbled right out of the pale-green void.

The backward stumble sent him crashing into Dalia. She braced against him as he broke free of the vision, keeping him from falling to the floor.

What in the hell just happened — was this even still Mars?

He hadn't even reached the golden toilet yet — how was he already getting the Guilliman treatment?

Dazed, Lin looked to Dalia, hoping the Guardian of the Dragon might know something. But the instant their eyes met, he realized she was watching him with wary eyes.

"You saw Him?"

"If you mean the thing under Mars, then yes."

"Did it affect you in any way? Confusion, scrambled thoughts?"

"He definitely wanted to tell me something, but I broke free just by stepping back."

"You don't look like someone who walked away that easily."

Following the direction of Dalia's scrutinizing gaze, Lin realized his own body was flickering with that same pale-green light as the Void Dragon's.

He stood and tested himself, but found nothing wrong with any of his equipment.

No enhancement, no weakening, no interference of any kind. Even the pale-green light eventually sank into his body and vanished without a trace.

At least on the surface, nothing had changed.

The test won him Dalia's trust. She let out a breath. "Good. He isn't friendly toward humanity. Long ago he was defeated and imprisoned deep beneath Mars — whatever he says, don't believe a word of it."

"You seem to know quite a lot. Is that because you're His guardian?"

"Strictly speaking, I'm a keeper. This device gave me the knowledge that let me learn of the Void Dragon's existence — and that's how I was chosen as the new Guardian of the Dragon."

Her fingers brushed the Akashic Reader, and a trace of remembrance crossed her face.

"This role lets me share fragments of his memory. But his thoughts are broken and chaotic — even I can't tell truth from lies in them."

"So you fight through his memories every single day? Like what I just went through in that vision?"

"No, not really. Most of the time he sleeps. It wasn't until you and the Imperial Fists arrived on Mars that He suddenly grew unusually active."

Lin nodded thoughtfully.

Honestly, he'd assumed that when Dalia first said someone wanted to see him but that she wouldn't let him, she meant the Golden One. He hadn't expected it to be the Void Dragon.

Of course, in the end he'd met the real deal anyway.

Though he still had no idea what that meeting had actually been for.

It couldn't just be to make him sympathize with the Thirteenth Prince, could it?

He decided to set the question aside for now — Dalia had finished repairing the Akashic Reader.

Things were back on track, for the moment.

The pale-green energy coating the Akashic Reader was unstable, forcing the device to run on power that seemed liable to collapse at any moment.

Dalia gave the machine one final check, then said firmly to Lin:

"You'll only get one chance to use it."

"It's ready to go, just like that? We don't need to tie a psyker to it and burn them for fuel?"

The Akashic Reader was a tool for dredging knowledge out of the Warp, and Lin had learned from the vision that operating it followed the Imperium's fine old tradition of 'you simply must burn a psyker to make it work.'

He doubted Dalia's claim that it was already usable. She simply explained: "There's no need. The last knowledge it stored is already inside it. This is your only chance to understand it — make it count."

Lin shrugged and sat down in the recipient's seat. Dalia activated the Reader, and at once a vast tide of information poured into his mind.

Lin understood what the last knowledge it held actually was.

It was the method for constructing an Akashic Reader.

That truly outweighed any other knowledge in importance. Lin focused every ounce of his attention on grasping it, but his unaugmented brain genuinely struggled with the task.

He felt exactly like he had back in school before crossing over — no matter what the teacher explained, the knowledge just slid right off his smooth, unretentive brain.

His golden finger was unrivaled, sure, but when it came to raw intellectual talent within the Warhammer world itself, Lin fell far short of true geniuses like Cawl.

Was the knowledge of how to build an Akashic Reader just going to slip away like that?

Unwilling to give up, Lin tried again, but on his own it was truly a lost cause.

Just as failure seemed all but certain, the pale-green energy that had sunk into Lin's body earlier suddenly surged back out.

Like tendrils, it seized hold of the construction knowledge and forced it, wholesale and unyielding, straight into Lin's mind.

The Akashic Reader crashed and burned out completely, and Lin was released from its grip.

The aftershock of the forced infusion hadn't faded yet, and Lin swayed unsteadily on his feet. When he tried to recall the knowledge, he found it had indeed been burned deep into his mind.

"That power..."

There was no doubt — it was the Void Dragon's power.

Lin hadn't noticed anything unusual about himself earlier; he'd never guessed this was where the Void Dragon's influence would show itself.

It acted like some kind of adapter, converting the things he couldn't understand into a form he could.

The cost was that Lin found the Void Dragon's power stored within him had noticeably dropped — clearly, the process had burned through some of it.

So the Void Dragon had actually been helping him?

Lin frowned, unable to understand why the star-god would do such a thing.

If he wanted to know, he'd probably have to ask the Void Dragon himself, but Dalia wasn't about to let him speak with it again, and he had no desire to see it a second time anytime soon, either.

The Void Dragon, being only a fragment, apparently couldn't manage anything close to coherent communication — and that kind of exchange wasn't something just anyone could withstand.

Don't tell him the Golden One, ten thousand years down the line, had picked up his whole mystical-riddle act from the Void Dragon?

Once he had the knowledge of how to build an Akashic Reader, the urge that had been driving him from within simply vanished.

Roughly grasping that the Void Dragon had been behind that urge all along, Lin felt no desire to linger any further. Mindful of the situation outside, he hoisted the still-unconscious Vladilena over his shoulder. "I need to get outside."

Dalia nodded. "I'll come with you."

"What about Neos and Evil Sun?"

"You'll see the greenskin and the... person, on your way out."

With his heart bleeding, Vashtorr had already taken note of Lin's shift in behavior.

He'd watched it clearly from atop the Titan: the Astartes, who'd been in the middle of packing up, suddenly abandoned the production lines and their withdrawal plans, setting up a defensive line beside a crack in the ground instead.

Vashtorr had no idea what they were doing, but he understood this was an opportunity.

Tied down by this bizarre war-suit, the Titan couldn't break the deadlock — but as long as the Astartes weren't withdrawing anytime soon, he could still pin his hopes on outside help.

Vashtorr's consciousness briefly returned to the column heading back toward Magma City to hurry them along.

His Dark Mechanicum cogboys and the ghouls needed no urging. But Skarbrand, who'd earlier been forced off the battlefield, was in a foul mood and wouldn't obey Vashtorr's commands.

Vashtorr went to Skarbrand's side, intending to give the Greater Daemon a proper talking-to.

"Skarbrand, don't forget we signed a contract. Until it's fulfilled, you can't slack off for any reason whatsoever..."

He droned on, contract in hand. For some reason, the moment Skarbrand sensed Vashtorr's arrival, he shot straight up onto his feet.

"What are you doing?"

Vashtorr flinched, nearly convinced this brainless Bloodthirster was about to tear up their pact and attack him outright.

But Skarbrand merely leaned in close and sniffed at him.

Like a hound, he sniffed carefully at the lingering trace of soul-scent clinging to Vashtorr, his expression shifting from shock into a trembling, ecstatic joy.

"It's Dorn — it's Dorn!!!"

He howled with excitement.

"Yes, I can smell him! Right on you!! Right on you!!!"

"Dorn? What Dorn?"

Vashtorr caught on quickly. "The Primarch?"

"That's right! You must have just been in contact with him — tell me where he is! Tell me where he is!"

Lin? Surely not him. But if not Lin, then who...?

Vashtorr thought of the other opponent he'd just clashed with, and Skarbrand's desperate urgency sketched out a possibility in his mind.

"The one inside that bizarre war-suit's cockpit... is Dorn!"

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