Ghostly Dreadnought

This story is part of the community effort on the Emperor's Nightmare chapter.

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The Librarian is charged to assemble the squad into communal dream. He travels to them one by one, clears their minds of self doubt and helps them up onto an arcane stone platform, a warded safehaven hovering over the desolate landscape.

Then, if he is deployed near the chapter keep in the waking world, the Librarian's mind carries the group over to the psychic manifestation of the building that the August Dreamwalkers in Iron constantly maintain. From there small squads of dreamers, each accompanied by at least one Librarian, astrally project themselves as far as they can imagine. Some Librarians have even mastered the technique of gazing back across the veil, spying on enemies through their dreams and through dreams of them. Space and time have no meaning in even this pale shadow realm of the warp and with training a Librarian can project his consciousness to almost any location.

August Brother Gavo, formerly the attached codicier for Battlegroup Primus 2nd Company before his crushing defeat at the hands of an Obliterator Lord, has even trained his mind to manifest a ghostly psychic construct of his formidable baroque tomb. He has not been roused from his slumber in eight hundred and sixteen years but each day the shadowy wisps of his mind stalk effortlessly about the chapter keep like a poltergeist, supervising the training of scouts and even accompanying the Battlegroups to war.

I was still young when I first saw August Gavo -- or at least that thing he wants us to see. I was not even a full neophyte then and had never so much as left my home planet. The marks were still sore from the first of many surgeries to come. It was during my squad's morning bolter drills inside the chapter keep that the foul beast struck: A vile agent of Kaliman, here -- I later learned to great sorrow -- to provide a distraction as our chapter master's mind was stolen from him.

But what terrible distraction it was. Half a dozen of my brothers were dead before I had time to turn and let off a shot. Our captain bravely charged the thing, calling for us to retreat and sound the alarm, but the daemon stabbed through his carapace armour and punctured both his hearts in a single fluid motion, tossing his body aside with disdain.

It was then that the ammunition in the nearby crates started going off. One or two bolt shells at first, then massive explosions as whole stockpiles detonated. Split seconds after this massive release of energy the most curious thing I have ever witnessed in my long years occurred: all the fire... all the light and force... moved.

Shifting with a will of its own to coalesce in the centre of the room, the fires traced the ever-flickering outlines of a dreadnought's hulking form. It was as beautiful as it was terrible. Though I am a Space Marine, on that day, I knew fear.

I have been to visit August Gavo's body in the dreamers' reclusium only once since then. It is far less unnerving. Trepidly, I placed my hand against the metal of his body, expecting it to twist and burn, but it is cold and unmoving to my touch. Gavo dreams.