The Angel in the Withywindle

There is a moment, the old Navigators say, when the Warp does not merely carry a soul but considers it — turns it over like a jeweler turns a stone to the light, and decides, on a whim older than stars, to set it somewhere else entirely.

Sanguinius felt that moment as a falling.

One instant he stood upon the embarkation deck of the Red Tear, gold armor catching the hell-glow of the Siege, his great wings half-mantled, his thoughts fixed upon a single black ship hanging in the ruined sky — the Vengeful Spirit, and the brother who waited aboard it. He had spoken the words of leaving. He had stepped toward the teleportarium, toward the death he had already seen in a hundred dreams, walking into it the way a man walks into cold water, unflinching because flinching changes nothing.

Then the deck was gone.

The roar of the bombardment was gone. The screaming of ten thousand vox-channels, the prayers, the engines, the grinding of a galaxy tearing itself apart — all of it folded shut like a book.

And there was birdsong.

He stood to his full towering height in a green and golden world, and for the space of three heartbeats the Angel of Baal did not understand it.

A river ran below him, brown and slow and patient, its banks crowded with willows that leaned out over the water as if to whisper to their own reflections. The light was the long honeyed light of a late afternoon that had clearly never heard of war. Reeds nodded. Somewhere a dragonfly stitched the air. The smell — Throne, the smell — was of cut grass and crushed mint and wet earth, and Sanguinius, who had not drawn a breath untainted by smoke or blood or incense in longer than he could remember, found that he had stopped breathing altogether.

His wings were spread wide, primaries trembling, every warrior instinct mapping the terrain for threat. There was none. There was only the valley, drowsing.

“This is a trick,” he said aloud, and his voice — built to carry over the din of planetary assault — came out small here, swallowed by the soft green hush. The Warp counterfeited paradise as easily as it counterfeited terror. He knew the shape of a lie. He had been lied to by the most beautiful things in creation.

And yet the grass did not melt into worms. The river did not run red. The willows simply went on being willows.

Then he heard the singing.

It came up the valley path with a great deal of confidence and no melody whatsoever that Sanguinius could name — a tumbling, nonsense, rhyming sort of singing, the kind a man makes when he is entirely alone and entirely happy and would not change a single thing about either circumstance:

Hey now! merry-o! down along the meadow, willow-water, weeping-water, river running shallow, who comes a-walking with the sun behind his shoulder? Old Tom knows the small things and the small things know him older!

And around the bend in the path came a man.

He was not a tall man. He was broad and stumping and old in the way that hills are old — which is to say not old at all, merely present, and likely to go on being present after everything taller had fallen down. He wore a blue coat and yellow boots, and a battered hat with a long feather in the band, and his beard was brown and his eyes were a startling, merry blue, and he was carrying a bundle of white waterlilies cradled in one arm as carefully as a man might carry a sleeping child.

He stopped when he saw the Angel. He looked up. And up. And up.

He did not draw a weapon, because he had none. He did not fall to his knees, as primarchs’ subjects fell. He did not scream, as the enemy screamed. He did not even seem especially surprised.

He simply tilted his head, the way a robin considers a worm, and grinned through his beard.

“Well now,” said Tom Bombadil. “There’s a big bird come down in my valley. Big golden bird with a sorrowful face. Whatever’s the matter, my fine feathered fellow? You’ve a look on you like the last leaf in November.”

Sanguinius had been called many things. The Great Angel. The Brightest of the Sons. The Pure One. Demigods had bowed to him. A galaxy had been conquered partly on the strength of the awe his very presence inspired. He could not remember the last being who had addressed him as my fine feathered fellow.

“You can see me,” Sanguinius said slowly. “What I am.”

“I see a great tall fellow with white wings and golden coat and a sword too heavy for the asking,” said Tom cheerfully, settling himself down on a mossy stone and patting the lilies into a neater bundle. “I see you’re far from home and dripping with somewhere-else. The water knew it before you came — went all a-shiver, it did. Things wash up in the Withywindle now and then. Mostly sticks. You’re a fair bit more than a stick.”

“Do you know what I am?”

“Does the river know what a fish is?” Tom shrugged. “It knows it’s wet, and it knows it’s passing through, and that’s enough for the river. You’re wet with battle, fish. Passing through. That much old Tom can see.”

“My name,” said the Angel, “is Sanguinius.”

“Is it!” Tom seemed delighted by this, the way he might be delighted by an interesting beetle. “A grand sloshing red sort of name, all blood and wine in it. Well, that’s your name, and you’re welcome to it, but old Tom won’t be needing it. Names are luggage, fish. You haul them about so other folk know which of them owns you. I’m not owned, so I travel light.” He patted the stone beside him. “Sit, sit. You’re blocking my evening sun, stood up there like a steeple.”

Sanguinius did not sit. Not at first. He stood at the river’s edge and looked down at this small, ridiculous, unafraid old man, and felt a suspicion sharpen in him that had nothing to do with the smell of mint or the patient brown water.

“You are not afraid of me,” he said. “Every living thing is afraid of me, on some level beneath thought. It is built into me. My father made me to be feared, among other things. Beasts flee me. Strong men weep. And you sit on a rock and tell me I am blocking your light.”

“You are, though,” said Tom mildly.

“Why are you not afraid.”

The old man considered this seriously, scratching at his beard. The feather in his hat bobbed. “Reckon it’s because I’m not for sale,” he said at last. “Fear’s a kind of buying and selling, isn’t it? A great big fellow comes along and says be afraid, and the small fellow looks at all he’s got — his life, his little patch, his tomorrow — and reckons up what he stands to lose, and pays it over in fright. But old Tom’s got nothing on the table. My patch was here before the big fellows learned to walk upright, and it’ll be here after. I can’t be made to fear losing what I never grabbed hold of in the first place.” He smiled. “So. Sit down, unsellable to unsellable, and tell me why a creature built for fearing has got such a frightened face of his own.”

And the Angel of Baal, who had refused thrones, sat down on the mossy bank of the Withywindle.

“There is a war,” Sanguinius said.

“There’s always a war, somewhere,” said Tom. “Willows war with the reeds for the riverbank. Badger wars with the fox over the good den. The frost wars with the spring every single year, and loses, every single year, and tries again. War’s just the world disagreeing with itself. What’s yours about, then?”

“It is not like the frost and the spring.” Sanguinius drew a breath. The words came slowly, because he had never had to explain the Heresy — everyone he had ever spoken to already lived inside it. “There was a great work. The greatest work ever attempted. My father set out to unite every world where men live, to throw down the false gods and the tyrants and the things in the dark that feed on us, and to build, in their place, an age of reason. A galaxy lit by mankind alone, beholden to nothing. We were his instruments. His sons. Twenty of us, made in his image, given to him to lead his armies and carry out the work.”

“Twenty sons!” Tom whistled. “That’s a deal of sons. Goldberry and I have got none, and I’ll confess I sleep the better for it. And these twenty — they’re like you? Big golden frightening fellows?”

“None of them is like me,” said Sanguinius, with the faintest ghost of a smile. “We are all of us different. That was the design. One is a hunter, silent as snowfall. One is a scholar who would rather read than rule. One is a brute and proud of it. One is wracked with rage he cannot master. One is the cleverest creature I have ever known, and one the kindest, and one so beautiful and so beloved that we all of us, every brother, would have followed him into any fire.” His voice changed on that last. Tom noticed. Tom noticed everything.

“Ah,” said Tom softly. “And that’s the one, isn’t it. The fire one.”

“His name is Horus.” Sanguinius said it the way a man touches an old wound to see if it still bleeds. It did. “He was the first of us, and the best of us, and our father loved him most, and named him Warmaster — first among the sons, given command of all the rest when our father returned to his great work and left the war to us.” He looked at the river. “And the things in the dark that my father set out to destroy — they are not so easily destroyed. They are old. Older than mankind. They are made of every cruel and hungry and frightened thing that has ever crawled through a living mind, and they have been waiting in the deep currents of the universe since before there were stars to mark the time. We have a name for that deep. We call it the Warp. It is how I came to be here — it threw me out of my own story and into yours, like a wave throwing a fish onto the grass.”

“I know the deep dark you mean,” said Tom, and for the first time the merriness in his eyes went still — not frightened, never that, but grave, the way deep water is grave. “It came knocking here too, fish, long and long ago, in shapes you’d not have a name for. It wanted the same thing it always wants. To be let in. To be agreed with. The dark can’t take a thing that won’t agree to be taken — that’s the whole sorrow and the whole mercy of it. It can only whisper, and wait for the yes.” He looked at the Angel keenly. “Your fire-brother. Your Horus. He said yes.”

Sanguinius closed his eyes. “He said yes.”

The light shifted by a degree. A kingfisher dropped from a willow-branch, took something silver from the river, and was gone in a blue flash. Neither of them watched it.

“Tell me how it was,” said Tom. Not a command. An offering — the way you’d offer to take a heavy basket from someone whose arms were failing.

“They poisoned him,” said Sanguinius. “Wounded him, body and spirit, and while he lay dying the dark offered him a bargain, the way it always does. Power to set the galaxy right as he saw fit. He took it. And then he came for the rest of us, brother by brother, and he asked us each the same question he’d asked himself — will you serve the failing dream of an absent father, or will you take what is owed to you, here, now, with me? And half of us said yes to him. Half. My brothers. Boys I had bled beside for two centuries turned their guns on the worlds we built together, and the galaxy has been burning ever since, and now it has come down to one city, on one world, the world that is my father’s seat — and the black ship hangs over it, and inside the black ship sits the thing that used to be the brother I loved most after my father, and I am going up to it. Alone. To face him.” He opened his eyes. “Because someone must, and because of all the loyal sons I am the one he might still listen to, for the length of a heartbeat, before the end. And because—”

He stopped.

“Because?” said Tom.

“Because I have already seen how it ends,” said Sanguinius, very quietly. “I have the curse of it. Foresight. I dream of things before they come, and they come. And I have dreamed, since I was young, of a golden angel dying in the dark at the hands of his brother. I have dreamed it so many times I know the shape of the wound. I am walking up to that ship to die. I have known it for a hundred years. And I am going anyway, because to turn aside is to let everything and everyone else die in my place, and I would rather it were me.”

For a long while Tom Bombadil said nothing at all, which was, for Tom, a thing as rare as snow in high summer.

Then he reached out, and with one weathered brown hand he plucked a single stem of grass, and he turned it over, and he looked at it as though it were the most interesting thing in three worlds.

“You’ve a great heavy gift, and it’s worked a great cruel trick on you,” he said at last. “Want to know the trick of it, fish?”

“Tell me.”

“You’ve gone and mistaken a dream for a door.” Tom held up the grass-stem. “You dream the ending, and you walk to the ending, and all the long way there you’re already half in the grave, because in your own head you’ve died a hundred deaths before the real one ever comes. You think the dream is a door you’ve got to walk through. But a dream’s not a door, fish. A dream’s a window. You can look through it. It doesn’t make you go.”

“It is fate,” said Sanguinius. “It is certain.”

“Is it!” Tom looked genuinely curious. “And how many of your dreams have come true, then, just exactly as you dreamed?”

“…Most.”

“Most.” Tom pounced on the word with great satisfaction. “Not all. So there’s a crack in your certain fate, fish, a crack the width of most-but-not-all, and you could drive a whole river through a crack like that. I’ve seen it done.” He tossed the grass-stem into the Withywindle, and they both watched it spin away on the brown water. “Here’s a thing old Tom knows that your great father with his great work never learned, for all his cleverness. The dark loves certainty. It loves a fellow who’s sure how the song ends, because a fellow who’s sure how the song ends has already stopped singing. He’s just waiting. And waiting’s the same as agreeing, in the deep dark. Waiting’s a kind of yes.” He fixed the Angel with his bright blue stare. “You’re not walking up to that ship to fight your brother, fish. You stopped fighting a hundred years ago. You’re walking up there to keep an appointment. And that, I’d wager, is exactly what the thing in the dark wants of you.”

Sanguinius was silent. It was the silence of a man who has been struck somewhere he did not know he could be struck.

“You speak as if you know it,” he said finally. “The dark. You speak as if you have stood where I stand.”

“Bless you, no.” Tom laughed, and the gravity broke off him like ice off a thawing branch. “I never stood where you stand. I stood here, which is the whole point of me. The dark came to Tom, in the deep of years — came as a great Rider all in black, came as a will that wanted everything and meant to have it, came carrying a little gold ring that’s bent better and braver folk than you into shadows of themselves.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Terrible thing, that ring. Whole world hangs on it, near enough. They’ll be passing it through my borders before long, I shouldn’t wonder — I can feel that one coming the way you feel rain. And do you know what it’d do to me, that great terrible world-ending ring of power that turns kings into wraiths?”

“What?”

Tom Bombadil grinned his enormous grin. “Nothing. Not a blessed thing. I could put it on my finger this minute and I’d not so much as flicker, because the ring’s whole power is over folk who want. It promises you the thing you’re hungry for. And I’m not hungry, fish. I’ve got my river and my willows and my Goldberry waiting up the hill with the kettle on, and I want for nothing under the sun, so there’s no handle on me for the dark to grab. That’s the secret. That’s the only secret there is. Want nothing it can give you, and it has no power over you at all.”

“I want nothing it can give me,” said Sanguinius. “I have refused it every gift it ever offered.”

“Have you, though?” Tom’s eyes glinted. “You want to be the one who dies so the others live. That’s a noble want, fish, a fine and golden want, the best want I ever heard. But it’s still a want, and the dark’s got hold of it. It’s whispering to you right now, I’d wager, in that grand sorrowful head of yours. Yes, go, die beautifully, die the way you dreamed, it’s already written, it’s already yours. The dark doesn’t always tempt you with the worst of you, fish.” He said it gently, almost tenderly. “Sometimes it tempts you with the best of you. The noble death. The beautiful sacrifice. It’ll take your finest feeling and turn it into a leash, and lead you right up the gangway of that black ship telling you all the way how brave you are.”

Sanguinius found that his hands were trembling. Gold gauntlets, faintly shaking in the grass. “Then what would you have me do?” he said, and there was something raw in it now, something that had not spoken in a very long time. “Refuse to go? Let the city fall? Let my father be torn down and my loyal brothers die unaided so that I might keep myself unleashed? You ask me to want nothing. I am made of want. I want to save them. I cannot put that down.”

“I’d not ask you to put it down.” Tom’s voice was suddenly firm, no nonsense in it at all. “Listen to me now, fish, for old Tom’s about to say a true thing and he doesn’t do it often. I’d not have you turn aside. The dying needs doing, maybe — if a thing’s coming for the folk you love, you stand between, that’s not a leash, that’s just love with its boots on. Go up to your black ship. Face your fire-brother. Do the brave hard thing. I’d not take that from you for all the lilies in the Withywindle.”

He leaned in close, and the whole green valley seemed to lean in with him.

“But go up there wanting to live. You hear me? Not certain you’ll die. Wanting to live. Go up that gangway like a fellow who’s got a kettle on the hill and means to come home to it. Fight him like you’ve got a hundred more suppers in you and you’re cross at him for trying to take them. The dark wants you to walk in already-buried, fish, all calm and golden and certain, because a fellow who’s made his peace with dying is a fellow who’s stopped fighting to live — and that’s the only way that thing ever wins. It can’t beat a creature that wants its next sunrise badly enough. It can only beat one that’s agreed to do without.”

“And if the dream is true?” Sanguinius whispered. “If I want to live with all that I am, and I die anyway?”

“Then you die wanting, and fighting, and alive right up to the last breath,” said Tom Bombadil, “instead of dying like a ghost who quit a hundred years ago and only kept walking out of politeness. Same ending, maybe. Maybe. But oh, fish — what a different song.”

The light was going amber now, sliding toward gold, and the first cool breath of evening came up off the water. Tom hauled himself up off his stone, gathered his lilies, and brushed at his blue coat. He seemed, abruptly, to remember something, and reached into the coat and drew out a heel of brown bread and a small wedge of yellow cheese.

“Here,” he said, holding them up. “You’ll not have eaten in a while, I’ll wager. Big golden fellows always forget to eat. Goldberry’s the same with me — Tom, you old fool, you’ve been out since morning with not a crumb. Eat.”

Sanguinius looked at the bread.

He was a primarch. He did not need it. His body was an engine of war that could run on its own catastrophic chemistry for days. The gesture was, by every measure of strategy and survival he possessed, entirely meaningless.

He took the bread, and he ate it, and it was the best thing he had ever tasted. He told Tom so.

“Course it is,” said Tom comfortably. “Everything is, when you eat it like a thing that wants to go on living. That’s not the bread, fish. That’s you, coming back. Tasting like you mean it. You’ve not done that in a hundred years either, I’d wager.”

They walked a little way along the bank together as the sun lowered, the Angel pacing slow to match the old man’s stump, his great wings folded now and trailing in the long grass.

“I have one more question,” said Sanguinius. “You have answered everything I asked, in your way. Answer this. What are you? In all my father’s galaxy, across a million worlds, I have met gods and daemons and engines that think and men who became more than men. I have never met anything like you. You are immune to a power that bends kings. You have lived longer than the stars. Are you a god? An angel older than I am? Something my father’s truth has no shelf for?”

Tom Bombadil stopped walking. He looked out across his valley — at the willows going dark, at the patient brown water catching the last of the gold, at the first faint star pricking through over the eastern hills. And when he answered, his voice had in it the whole long weight of the years he carried so lightly.

“I’m the eldest, fish,” he said. “That’s the nearest word for it in any tongue I know. I was here before the river found its bed. I knew the first raindrop and the first acorn and the first dark thing that came creeping, and I’ll likely be here pottering about when the last of them’s gone. I’m not a god — gods want, and I’ve told you I don’t. I’m not an angel — angels serve, and I serve nobody. I’m not the dark, and I’m not the light that fights it.” He smiled, and it was the oldest and kindest thing Sanguinius had ever seen on a face. “I’m just the fellow who stayed. Who watched it all go by and didn’t grab at any of it. Master of wood and water and hill — not because I conquered them, mind, but because I love them and want nothing of them but their company. That’s a master worth being, fish. The other kind — the kind your fire-brother’s trying to be, the kind that takes and takes — that kind isn’t master of anything. Not even himself. Specially not himself.”

“My father,” said Sanguinius slowly, “would not have known what to do with you.”

“No,” Tom agreed, with great cheer. “Reckon he wouldn’t. Folk who set out to own everything never do know what to make of a fellow who owns nothing and is happier than they are. Galls them something terrible.” He chuckled. “You tell your father, if you ever see him again — there’s an old fool in a blue coat at the edge of the world who beat the dark without ever raising a hand to it, just by being too content to be tempted. He’ll hate that. Good for him.”

The valley was beginning to fold shut.

Sanguinius felt it before he saw it — the pull at the edges of him, the Warp remembering its appointment, the brown river beginning to run not into the eastern hills but into light, pure and directionless. The willows blurred at their margins. The birdsong thinned. Somewhere very far away, on the other side of a wound in creation, a black ship hung over a burning city, and a thing wearing his brother’s face was waiting with infinite patience for an appointment the Angel had no intention, now, of keeping in the old way.

“It is taking me back,” he said.

“Course it is. You’re a fish, fish. You don’t belong on my grass, however nice it was to have you.” Tom planted his yellow boots and looked up at the towering golden figure already going translucent at the edges, and he did not look sorrowful, and he did not look afraid, because Tom Bombadil had never in his long, long life learned how to do either. “Go on, then. Up to your black ship. Do the brave hard thing.”

“I am still going to die,” said Sanguinius. But it came out differently now. Not as a verdict. As a fact among other facts — and not the largest of them.

“Maybe!” said Tom, with maddening, glorious unconcern. “Everything green does, fish. And comes up green again somewhere, some spring, whether it knows the way or not. So go and do your dying, if it needs doing and you’re the one to do it.” He reached up — up — and patted the Angel’s golden vambrace one last time, the way one might gentle a great horse. “But go up there alive, you hear me? Wanting your next sunrise. Cross as a wet cat that he’s trying to take it from you. Tasting it like the bread. Not as a ghost who quit a hundred years ago. As a fellow who had his supper by the Withywindle and means to have a thousand more. Promise old Tom that much.”

The light was nearly all there was now. Sanguinius was a shape of gold and white dissolving into it, and the last of the green world ran through his fingers like water.

“I promise,” said the Great Angel.

And the very last thing he heard, as the valley let him go and the iron stink of the Siege came roaring back and the deck of the teleportarium reassembled itself cold and hard beneath his golden boots — the last thing, warm and merry and utterly, gloriously without fear, was a singing voice tumbling away down a river that no Imperial chart would ever hold:

Hey! Come merry-o! the sun’s gone under hilltop, Tom’s away to supper now, his singing’ll not stop, Eldest he, and master, and the dark has got no daughter Can put a single shadow on the bright of Tom’s own water!

Aboard the Vengeful Spirit, in the red dark, Sanguinius of the Blood Angels straightened to his full and terrible height. His sword was in his hand. The thing wearing his brother’s face turned to greet him, and began, in his brother’s beloved voice, to speak its lies — the old whisper, dressed in gold this time, the noble death, the beautiful sacrifice, the ending already written, yes, come, it is already yours.

The Angel was smiling.

It was not the smile of a being who did not know how this ended. He knew exactly how it might end. He had always known.

But somewhere on the far side of a wound in the world there was a slow brown river, and an old man in yellow boots who owned nothing and feared nothing and had beaten the dark a thousand times over simply by being too content to be taken — and that old man had given him bread, and told him the secret, and asked him for a promise.

So when the thing in the dark whispered yes, it is already yours, the Great Angel raised his blade, and wanting his next sunrise with every fibre of his golden being, cross as a wet cat that anything should dare try to take it from him, alive right down to the marrow of him for the first time in a hundred years —

— he said no.

And whatever came after, he met it singing.