Sanguinius vs Ka'Bandha (Round 2) [Warhammer 40K Excerpt Narration] [Editing Practice]

Transcript

In your arrogance, you still believe this is about you and me? The demon barked a laugh, bloody saliva spraying from his jaws to decorate the angel's already bloody features. That, O purest one, is your father's vanity within you.

The demon was ungifted at reading human expression, but something like pain flickered on the angel's face, and that, too, was beautiful. Cabunda drew his gargoyle head back, brazenly readying for a headbutt. The angel launched backwards, just as the demon desired, and Cabunda stole those precious seconds of freedom to turn and sweep his great axe through a warring blood angel's and never-born-nearby, butchering swathes of both.

Strength flowed through him with a cramping sting, and the creature turned in time to catch the angel's blade against the flat of his axe. Then they came face-to-face. I am not here for you.

The demon's mouth wasn't made for human language, and his fangs were aligned for the aesthetics of cruelty not set by evolution. You are nothing. A flicker in the fires of time.

A pawn with pretty wings, calling itself a king. Sanguinius's eyes were tight, half-closed with a strain. Words were almost beyond him, every vein and tendon thickly visible.

Cabunda's blood-coated throat was already hoarse with the effort of human speech, but more words bubbled up and forth through a knife-fang smile. You taught me patience, angel of the craving god. You taught me my place.

I am the beast that will feast on your sons in the centuries to come. I am the cancer that will eat away at your lineage until the last man with your bloodiest veins is dust, Balfour is wind. Fire from the burning avenue reflected along the length of the angel's blade.

I will destroy you, demon, every time you crawl from the prison of hell. Cabunda, teeth clenched with effort, spoke with his breath reeking of Astarte's blood. Insidious sensuality flavored his tone.

You won't be around to defend your children forever. Sanguinius palled beneath the war-grime darkening his features, and Cabunda roared, hurling the angel back. Sanguinius twisted in the air, avoiding the swing of the axe but not the lash of the whip.

It barely struck, coiling around one wing, but it was more than enough for the demon's need. Cabunda dragged him on the leash, pulling the primarch from the air and back down to the broken marble. Sanguinius struck with inhuman grace, already weaving to slice at the entangling lash.

Cabunda cared not. He abandoned his whip, leaping and beating his wings, making for the center of the royal ascension that the blood angels clustered at their thickest. World-eaters and the war-master's other half-mortals cried their blessings up at him, as if their benedictions mattered at all to such a being as he.

In a moment such as this, he landed amidst dozens of red-clad blood angels, bereaving them from life with swings of his axe. Sounding his carnosaur roars, he devoured their souls and stories. Names and faces and memories, not his own, saturated him, threatening his senses.

Still, the creature killed, using every precious second. The failed champion's thoughts were a storm of uneasy, unsettled psyches. Twice more, the angel was upon him, cutting and hacking.

Twice more, the demon managed to break free, battering the primarch aside or hurling him away. Cabunda fled again, taking flight, and this time the angel was on him in the air. The two of them crashed to the earth scarcely two seconds after leaving it, the slender golden figure rolling atop the demonic giant, raising his sword, plunging it down.

The demon pounded the angel aside with the flat of Zax, desperation sinking into his essence now. This was faster than their battles on Cygnus Prime, devoid of posturing and skill, reduced to the clumsy viciousness of a brawl. He rose, bellowing, roaring for opponents, bludgeoning himself at the closest blood angels and rending them limb from limb.

Their bolters spat up at him, their swords cut into him, and they died, making that display a futile wrath. The angel struck him again, this time with enough force to throw him off his feet. The primarch was a hunting hawk, all wings and cutting edges, thrashing against the demon as it fought to get free.

Cabunda shielded his face with his free arm for a moment too late. He snarled at the crash of the silver blade, laying open his face to the bone, stealing one of his eyes. It didn't hurt as mortals feel pain, but shame and rage burned in their own ways, just as fiercely.

Each time the angel pulled free, the demon dragged him back into the brawl. When the demon surged back up, the angel was upon it, a half-breathed angel. A white-winged shrike circling the creature and raining silver blows.

Cabunda's roars became howls, then bestial detonations of anger and pain. The demon had lost an eye. Zephon saw the great angel pulpit in his fist and hurl the resulting sludge aside.

When Zephon ran in with several of his bolters, Sanguinius ordered them away in a strained voice over the vox. The world eaters, hissed the primarch, called them back. The demon and the angel clutched each other by the throat, the former to choke the life from the other, the latter using his grip only to smash the back of his foe's head against the marble ground.

Sanguinius, dark with strangulation, with strings of spit hanging from his teeth, wrenched the demon's head up and down. Again, again, again, first cracking the marble with the anvil of Cabunda's skull, then breaking it. The stone broke while the beast's head refused to.

Nevertheless, it was enough. The creature's claws went slack for long enough that the angel broke free. Zephon saw his sire launch into the sky.

The demon was either unable to ignore this foe, or too wounded and blood-frenzied to let it go. With a spray of stinking blood from his wounded wings, Cabunda gave chase. Later, it would regret this.

Later, it would realize it poisoned its final chance at fading victory the moment it abandoned its hunt to the souls of the Ninth Bloodline, when it had allowed rage and fear to shroud its vision. Later, it would be too late to matter. Zephon was free for long enough to witness the brawl's end.

He saw Sanguinius descending as the demon rose. The Primarch had drawn both spear and sword, and the angel hurled the lance with a cry of effort. The spear took the demon in the chest, penetrating armor and corpus, sinking home as if it belonged there.

A thunderous cheer rose from the warriors on the ground, Zephon's voice among them. The demon's next roar was wholly bestial. A cry of vented frustration.

Wounded in truth, it struggled to climb, feverish, almost fearful that it would need to catch its tormentor. Sanguinius gave the wounded beast what it desired. Zephon watched his Primarch close the distance.

White wings sleek to his back. The angel took the creature as it was gaining strength in its climb, rolling aside from the demon's reaching claws and striking behind with the force of the Emperor's own wrath. He hid it between the wings, his sword hilting in the creature's spine, shattering its back and bursting from Cabanda's breastplate.

The blade's point hissed with the smoke of stolen souls leaking from the wound, and the demon hung in the air a moment more in defiance of mortal law. It gagged, and a sludge of undigested spirits sluiced from its open jaws. Cabanda dropped, the creature crashing against the sanctum wall and leaving a smear of demonic blood as it fell.

Its wings no longer beat, its limbs were dead. Sanguinius followed the body down in a dive, gripping the demon by the back of the neck and the hilt of his sword impaled in its spine. He could have let the creature fall, Zephon would always think that in the days, the years, the decades that followed when he wore black and fought for an imperium he no longer understood.

Sanguinius could have let the demon fall, striking the earth before the eternity gate. But the angel screamed, the sound as invested with rage as any sound that ever left the demon's throat, and he hurled the dying monster out across the royal ascension. It crashed amidst the advancing horde and rolled bonelessly down the marble stairs, a monument to the failure of naked fury.

Zephon's last sight of Cabanda was as packs of lesser demon kind swarmed over the body, doing their carrion work. There was no comfort in that, no vindication. It echoed too closely to the Ninth Legion's old rituals.

He wanted to acknowledge no kinship between him and Cabanda, he wanted to acknowledge no kinship between his kind and theirs.