Pearlygates asked in the comments section of the last post whether I had written any fiction for 40k. The answer is ‘yes’ and, if you go to this link, you’ll see most of them. Not all of them, and not the most recent ones, but most of them. And you might also work out where this blog gets its name from… 
Since there is a lot of stuff waiting for you if you follow that link, here’s one that I have yet to put up there. I wrote it for a Halloween competition on one of the forums (forget which one). It’s pretty short, so you should be able to read it in about five minutes. You’ve got five minutes, haven’t you? 
Feel free to leave comments and crit.
Hollow’s Eve
by Sholto
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I remember it was cold that night. Very cold. The kind of night that left Devil’s Pies in the morning – the tops of the nightsoil buckets frozen solid, and some poor ‘script or unlucky sod on a warrant had to go around and crack them open just so he could slop them out. I don’t need to paint you a picture of what that was like, but it happened a lot. This was a Throne-forsaken outpost on a Throne-forsaken world that had everything a man could want, provided all he wanted was endless miles of broken, frozen dirt, grit in places it should never be and freezing, pitch-black nights to keep watch on all the endless dirt and grit as it failed to do anything interesting. It hurt to breathe air that cold, and my coat felt like it was sucking the heat from my body rather than keeping me warm, so when Vennick came back late from the latrine sheds I wasn’t best pleased.
“You fecking fall in or something?” It wasn’t that I had anywhere else to go when he came back or anything to do; I was just being annoyed on basic principles. Misery loves company, even when it’s someone like Vennick.
He had his coat clutched tight around him and his sparkling repartee quick to hand. “It’s cold,” was all he said, then crouched down on his haunches next to the magnoculars and our rifles, looking out away from the camp.
Truth be told, it wasn’t just misery that loved company. Fear loved company, too, and I had a little dose of it that night. Enough of a dose to have paced a few anxious steps waiting for the constipated Vennick to return. Word around the camp was that the dirt and the grit might not have been as dead and uninteresting as we had all thought. Some unusual people had been seen visiting the outpost, and their kind didn’t turn up unless there was something worth turning up for. What kind were they? The inquisitive kind, if you catch my drift. Well, wasn’t that just fecking marvellous. Strange as it may seem, as much as I hated dead and uninteresting, I hated the opposite even more.
I wedged myself into a sandbag corner like a mouse in its burrow, took the mailslate out for the billionth time and tucked the earpiece in. I would have to hand it back in come the morning, and some masochistic part of me wanted to see how many times I could listen to Ellie breaking my heart between now and then. It was like, maybe if I just soak all this up now, really steep myself in it, it won’t still be hurting weeks or months down the line. Kind of get it all over with. Yeah. Good luck with that.
“You know what they used to call this night?” Vennick said out of nowhere, probably mercifully for my dangerously self-pitying state of mind. His voice didn’t sound sandpaper-dry like mine did, which made me suspect he had some sump-liquor and was holding out on me. Would explain the ‘delay’ at the latrines. B*****d.
“Fecked if I know, Vennick.” I dredged a little wit. “Tomorrow?”
“Hollow’s Eve,” he said, still looking out at nothing. “From old Terra. Very old Terra. All Hollow’s Eve.”
Conversation was conversation, and I couldn’t listen to the letter, especially the bit about how she wasn’t going to tell the baby I was his father – for his sake – while Vennick was giving off vapours. “What’s that mean? Hollow what?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. They used to dress up, the story goes, on Hollow’s Eve. Put on devil masks and daemon horns and frighten the children.” Vennick shrugged. At least I think he did; he still had his arms wrapped tight around him and his hands inside his coat. It was more of a shudder than a shrug. “Maybe it was they were hollow inside. They got dressed up to be someone else, because there was nothing underneath. Maybe that’s why they called it Hollow’s Eve.” He turned his head, his face invisible in the dark. “You think that might be it?”
I didn’t like him staring at me like that when I couldn’t see his face, so I waited until he turned away again. This night was getting to me if I was starting to be creeped out by Vennick. The man chewed his own toenails, for Throne’s sake. “Sure. Why not. Makes sense.”
“It’s cold,” Vennick said, after a few minutes had gone by.
“It’s that coat. Told you not to take the lining out, but you said it rustled, that it gave your position away when you were-”
“It’s getting colder.”
“Fine. Whatever, Vennick. I’m cold. You’re cold. You know what? The whole fecking planet is cold, so let’s just drop it and get the cards out.”
“I want to remember what it was like,” he said, “before there was nothing. I need something warm to wear.” At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what he said. For a moment it sounded like he said ‘someone’, but you start to hear things when you’ve been on watch for hours.
I was about to come out with a killer line about self-heating ration packs, his current squatting position and just how far I could shove said pack when I noticed his arms. There was something wrong about them. They were too long.
They were wrapped around his body, so it was hard to tell, but with a sensation that made the cold feel like an old, much loved friend, I could see they went just a bit too far. There was something glinting under there, where his hands should be. Suddenly, I wished I could see his face, and then just as quickly tried to wish that away. Things got a bit muddled, and I forget the order in which some of them happened to be honest, but it was around about this point, with my heart dumping adrenaline into my system like a sewage plant on overflow and my mind shouting at itself like a barracks in uproar, that I realised he was crouched next to the only guns in the watchpost.
I may have laughed, or it might have been a cough. Whatever it was I did, it was clumsy, and as I stood up, so did he. Those arms were still wrapped around his body, and I prayed to the Emperor like I had never prayed before that they stayed there.
“Have to,” I waved a hand vaguely, feebly trying to sound casual, “have to, you know. Gotta take a leak.” Holy Throne, he was walking towards me.
I took a step towards the exit and then he was inches from me. It was so dark, all I could see was the starlight on his helmet. There was a smell; not sump liquor, not latrine odour, but something red and wet and very familiar. He tilted his head sideways; I saw a silver hint of his face. It looked like Vennick, but slumped, as if he had been wax left next to a heater. What had he been saying about being hollow?
And then I dropped it. The noise was so sudden, when the mailslate hit the packed dirt, I think my blood stopped moving in my veins.
The slate lay there between us, the soft light from the screen shining on our boots. Vennick’s were darkly wet.
Please don’t pick it it up. Please don’t pick it up. Please don’t pick it up.
I didn’t want to see those arms.
“Aren’t you going to pick that up?” Venner asked. His lips moved, but it was all wrong, and then the dumb mailslate must have thought I pressed a button when it fell and the letter from Ellie started playing.
I couldn’t take my eyes from the dark shadow where Vennick’s face lurked, while Ellie’s voice drifted up from the tiny vox panel on the slate. I stared at him, while she told me about Adam, which wasn’t the name we had picked, but that was okay because Adam was a good name, and she told me about his first smile, which I had missed, but that was okay because she would send a vid, soon, and she told me about how his tiny fingers wrapped around her own so tight she thought he would never let go, and that was okay too, because I knew once you had Ellie you never wanted to let her go, and she told me about his eyes, and how they reminded her of me, and how that was going to be the hardest thing of all, having Adam remind her of me, because you see…
And I stared at Vennick, too scared to move, as Ellie ripped my heart out all over again. Flayed it, right there, like it was the first time.
And then it was over, and the slate beeped and the light went out and I realised I hadn’t been breathing and that now I was going to die.
Tiny wisps of vapour drifted up in front of me when I breathed the tiny breaths I forced myself to take, but from him came nothing. I had faced death before, of course, but this was different. This felt – intimate. And then, Emperor be praised till the day I die but I will never understand why, he or it or whatever Vennick was turned and walked slowly away to the edge of the foxhole.
“Go,” was all he said, in a voice that was not Vennick’s any longer, and I was not about to argue with him.
I came back, armed with a lasrifle and half the outpost, but he was gone. So was the mailslate.
We found Vennick’s body, down by the latrines, although it took a while to properly identify him. Just the bones and the major organs. A few scraps of flesh. The rest had been stripped clean away with tools that were razor sharp. I just kept thinking about those arms, and the things that weren’t hands that glinted in the starlight.
We left that world not long after, amid much talk of strange tombs rising from the frozen dirt. I never saw Ellie or Adam again.
THE END
NOTE: If you take a look at the picture on the blog masthead (click below for a much embiggened version), that was done by my good mate Ricky, inspired by this story of all things.
The ice had long gone, of course, long before the seas themselves went during the sacrilegious bombardment of Holy Terra by the forces of the Great Traitor. All that was left behind was bare rock, rippled and whorled into a new sea of glassy, black stone from the unimaginable forces unleashed during those darkest of days.
Seeking new territory on Holy Terra came the Inquisition; the dread Ordo Hereticus. From one pole, already the site of their hidden headquarters, to another, new dungeons to exhume. Under this fused and newly-frozen ocean the Inquisition dug, deep into the tortured bedrock they went, new halls and chambers won from the cold, dead stone, and filled with unnameable and eldritch secrets wrenched bleeding from a galaxy of horrors, stored far beneath the surface, never to rise.
Their labyrinthine delvings continued over the decades and centuries that followed, their underground empire branching new limbs and organs in the stygian depths, but the rumours that had plagued the sunken fortress of despair could not be buried.
Rumours of a man who stalked the tunnels, the corridors, the hallways in the eternal night, wreathed in red fire and rimmed with hoar-frost. Rumours of a man who was not a man, a daemon who could not be caught, not even by those who hunted the greatest and most mortal enemies of the Imperium. A cursed revenant of ages past who appeared once every year, evading security systems that could catch the mote in a man’s eye, one breath in a hurricane, the shadow of a shadow. Locked doors could not stop him, trusted steel and adamantium like rain unto a wave, and so the Inquisition huddled in their cells once a year, terrified to fall asleep.
But sleep they must, and sleep they did. And awoke, in the fake morning of that fake night, to find by their beds a single piece of darkest coal and always the echo, fading away down the endless halls and tunnels.
“Ho. Ho. Ho.”
I don’t usually post stories unless they are complete, but it’s always good to do things a little differently now and then, so here is the first 3000 words of Lost And Broken Things, one of my failed entries to the Fear The Alien competition.
This story will not be 7000 words. Since I have no length restrictions, I can flesh out a few ideas and situations. It won’t be too much more than 7000, though.
I have precious little idea what the title refers to. It might fit. My instinct says it does, my reason otherwise.
All comments and crit gratefully received
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Lost And Broken Things
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The lights in the troop compartment went out slowly, but the chimera’s engine died immediately and without a splutter. As the lights faded to black through yellow and ochre, Quartermaster Fynneas Gage could hear the crunch of the desert crust over the clank of the tracks, and then even those sounds vanished as the compartment went dark. The chassis rocked briefly and then everything was still and silent.
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