If he could.

Ba’ken went on. ‘Like all on Nocturne, they harbour the knowledge that death is seldom far away and seek meaning before it claims them. Weakness and desperation make them do it, not truth.’

A tower of ceramite and stony hard will, Ba’ken dwarfed the much slighter Scout. Thick pauldrons sat like chunks of smoothed granite on his vast shoulders. His muscled neck was cable-thick, taut sinews suggesting strength. Green armour plate, the hue of the Salamanders Chapter, encased his imposing frame and only made him more intimidating. Head shorn to a glabrous scalp, the rest of his features were craggy like a rockface. Physically massive, Ba’ken had been ideally suited to his former role as a heavy weapons trooper. Those days were ended long ago, and the now captain of the Seventh missed them, as he missed a great many things he had lost.

‘I heard the Igneans raised some kind of shrine,’ said the Scout standing at Ba’ken’s opposite shoulder. ‘Dozens die every day in search of it, and the ones who built it are no longer alive to tell of its existence either. Myths can be dangerous. They’re the province of the gullible and desperate.’

Exor was much more pragmatic and a little thicker set than Va’lin. There was a hard streak in him that reminded Ba’ken of someone else he once knew, also now believed dead, although his brothers still searched. But there was no arrogance. He was simply blunt, like a hammer. That too reminded him of someone, and he wondered where the Chaplain was at that moment. Exor believed in what he could see and touch, qualities Ba’ken respected. But Va’lin… Ba’ken had saved his life when the Scout was just a boy and not the transhuman he was rapidly becoming now. It felt like an age ago. During their trials, back in the time of dragon-strife, as some of the Chapter and the Creed were calling it, he had been exceptional. Then again, so had another and his legacy was still talked about darkly by some warriors of the Chapter.

Old wounds, Ba’ken reminded himself, were often slow to heal.

Both Scouts, not far from receiving their black carapace, were here on the Scorian Plain to heed a final lesson before going to the ranks of the Devastators.

‘Eyes front,’ Ba’ken told his charges. ‘We are not here for pilgrims, and there is still much I can teach you before you ascend to full battle-brothers and join one of the battle companies.’ He squinted through a monocular lens past kilometres of dirty smoke and acres of cloud washing low over the dunes, filling the deep canyon that sank into the desert before them with slate-grey. ‘See here and attend,’ said the captain. ‘Aspirants fresh into the forge.’