The Haunter Has Come

Dust roared and burned among the clouds. Red veins crossed the land like torture instruments glowing in a lightless dungeon. Great fissures split the planet's surface among collapsed defenses and ruined cities. Molten rock welled from the broken earth. Beyond the human settlements stretched desolate wastes, where immense, savage beasts hunted anything alive amid the blowing sand. Grand buildings had crumbled, leaving no trace of their former splendor. Humanity struggled to survive here. This was Nostramo after the bombardment.

Ramshackle dwellings crowded the ruins of a once-great city. The people of the wasteland had built their crude settlement from scavenged metal, bones, and stones. Anything green was precious. Trees, commonplace on other worlds, were treasures here. Only the powerful could afford to use their wood.

For walls, the settlers had only rough stone and the bones of the creatures roaming outside. Those beasts were enormous, born to kill. Humans had to gather together to stand a chance against them.

Ruisi moved silently through the night, his clothes in rags and his face smeared with dirt. He looked enviously toward the distant castle. Even at this hour, it blazed with lights. Drinking songs drifted on the night breeze across the barren world. The powerful were probably holding the women they fancied, drinking fine wine, and bawling harsh songs handed down from some forgotten age.

Ruisi knew none of that was for him. He was one of the lowest of the low. His life consisted of hammering away in a bottomless mine in exchange for a little food from the overseers.

After a long walk, he reached home. It was a pit lined with sheet metal and covered with whatever would keep out the wind and rain. His parents sat beside the stove. His mother was mending his little sister's clothes, stripped from someone who had died a few days earlier. Even those had cost a great deal of food. His sister had been delighted with the garment. It was covered in patches, but at least it had no holes.

He greeted his parents and ate some of the gruel simmering on the stove, made from red moss and protein blocks. Then he went to bed. A day's labor had left him feeling as though every bone in his body creaked. He crawled into his cramped sleeping hollow, lined with soft, dry grass. Tall trees were precious, but low-growing moss and weeds were easy enough to find.

As he crawled in, he brushed against his ten-year-old sister. In the firelight, he could see the bluish pallor that years of malnutrition had left on her face. Her arms were pale and thin. She lay curled beneath a heavy, foul-smelling garment, her tousled blond hair showing above it and an old scarf wrapped around her feet. Her breathing was slow and even. She was sound asleep.

Ruisi carefully shifted her aside. He took a small piece of dark bread from inside his clothes, saved from his meal at work, and slipped it into her pocket. A little surprise for the sleepyhead.

As he drifted off, he heard his parents talking. “The lord wants us to hunt that thing,” his father said anxiously. “They say it's a monster. I'm not afraid of dying. After all these years of misery, the sooner it ends, the better. But what would happen to you and the children?”

“Can't you refuse?” his mother asked miserably. “We pay so much in taxes every year. Why do they have to send us to our deaths too?”

“The lord sent his own men. They say every one of them died. The traders say the monster came from the cities in the north. It's killed a lot of people. It doesn't care who they are...” Fear entered his father's voice.

Work like that could be a one-way journey with the slightest mistake. There would be no compensation for his death, either. Yet refusing was not an option. His parents continued murmuring, and Ruisi fell asleep listening to them. When he woke, a faint whiteness had appeared along the horizon.

His bladder had woken him. He felt his way through the dark, moving as quietly as he could and avoiding anything that might make a noise. Outside, he hurried toward a foul-smelling pool far from the house. Keeping waste as far from home as possible reduced the risk of disease.

In the faint moonlight, he saw two men drag a young woman into a dark corner. Some women had to leave for the factories before dawn to earn enough food to live. Something terrible was about to happen to this worker. Across this lawless wilderness, a hundred merciless men did the same thing every hour. No one cared about an innocent woman like her. What little order existed served only to keep production going. In a world where survival took everything, anything short of death was treated as a minor concern.

At first Ruisi meant to stay out of it. Then he went closer. The men tore at her clothes, breathing in low, eager gasps. He was about to shout when a ghostlike figure moved through the shadows. The towering stranger closed thin fingers around one man's head and snapped his neck with a slight twist. Ruisi watched in horror as the body twitched like a small animal with a broken neck.

The second attacker began to sob. Ruisi smelled urine. Then came another sharp crack of bone, and a limp body landed on a stinking heap of garbage.

Having punished the attackers, the figure stepped slowly out of the shadows. Moonlight revealed a giant far larger than an ordinary man. His face was pale, his lips thin and bloodless. Long, fine hair framed him like something from a nightmare. His eyes were entirely black, pupil and iris merging into unbroken circles. Dried blood fouled his hair. Yet no one could deny his perfection. He looked like a god's most flawless creation.

Ruisi met those eyes and saw pain and a wisdom beyond anything human. His knees weakened. He stumbled backward, tripped over refuse, and fell. Then he turned and ran, scrambling across foul-smelling mounds toward home. His heart hammered. Phlegm and vomit choked his breath. His legs felt like rubber and would not obey him. His mind screamed at his body to move, but he could go no faster.

Running with everything he had, Ruisi glanced back. The stranger was not following. He turned forward and crashed into something solid. A tall man stood before him, a pair of sharp metal claws glinting silver in the moonlight.

Curiosity briefly showed in the man's bloodless face as he looked at Ruisi. Then it vanished. He raised his claws and drove them down, meaning to kill the person who had caught his attention. Metal shrieked against metal. Someone blocked the blow and shoved Ruisi aside.

A second giant had appeared. In the dim moonlight, Ruisi saw with horror how much the newcomer resembled the one who had punished the attackers. The same night-black hair. The same pale face. Even covered in filth, both retained that impossible perfection.

“What are you doing here?”

“Why shouldn't I be here?”

“Fate says you shouldn't.”

“Ten thousand years, and you're still fate's slave. You're beyond hope.”

Ruisi understood none of it. Ignoring his pain, he turned and fled home. He was terrified. These men moved like ghosts, appearing and vanishing without a trace. Only when he crawled into his sleeping hollow could he begin to calm down. His sister's familiar warmth helped him recover a little sense. Still, he pulled his ragged covering over his head and peered into the darkness, afraid he would see those terrible shadows inside their home.

He remembered a legend passed down for ten thousand years. When clouds hid Nostramo's moons, the Haunter walked the world. He killed those who enslaved or harmed others, using the cruelest means imaginable. Wherever injustice was done, he would appear. The Haunter of those stories looked just like the man Ruisi had seen: a bloodless face and hair as black as night.

“The Haunter has returned.”

The terrible Haunter was back on Nostramo. Ruisi trembled at the thought. By the next morning, he still had not slept. His father rose and found him shaking, repeating that the Haunter had returned. The color drained from his face.

Once the news spread, richly dressed people crowded into Ruisi's home. They demanded every detail. Even hearing the story frightened them. The spectral monster feared by the powerful had reached their settlement. They found the young woman who had been attacked as well.

First she had faced her attackers, then something far more terrifying. The creature in the shadows had left a deeper horror than the two men. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw his gaze again and felt herself drowning in fear. After killing the men who had assaulted her, he had stared at her for a long time. There had been no desire in those black eyes, only a coldness like that of a corpse.

No one cared about her terror. The powerful took turns questioning her about the monster, as though asking often enough could make his arrival untrue.

Soon they found the attackers' bodies. There were no spectacular wounds. Someone had simply broken their necks with ease. That was enough for fear to spread. Horrifying stories had already come from the north. Everyone who encountered the monster suffered something terrible. In some nobles' castles, nothing remained but severed limbs.

No one dared go out at night. After dark, the entire settlement fell deathly still as its people cowered in their homes. Ruisi and the other workers could work only in daylight. As sunset approached, everyone rushed home.

Ruisi saw the lord's guards, too. They piloted towering steel machines that could crush boulders with ease. If anything on this world could fight the Haunter, it had to be those armored guards.

Then the bad news came. A unit sent to hunt the enemy was found torn apart in the wilderness. Even their supposedly impenetrable metal armor lay in fragments, as though some beast's claws had ripped through it effortlessly.

The horror was far from over. The next day, their lord was dead. All his guards had been dismembered with an artist's precision. The lord and his family hung in a neat row from ropes along the castle wall.

With his authority gone, many tried to loot whatever they could and flee. Everyone who gave free rein to that darkness met an unimaginably cruel death. Their heads were displayed above corpses stripped of flesh and laid bare to the bone. Through these horrors, the Haunter announced his silent rule over the wasteland.

The people could only stay where they were and work under the old order. No one dared idle or take what belonged to another. Those who did were usually heaps of meat by the next morning. Bloody terror settled over the world, and a phrase began to spread: the Haunter has come.

Unseen by ordinary people, a terrible struggle was taking place in the darkness. Corax, Primarch of the Raven Guard, had followed the clues to Curze, Primarch of the Night Lords. The mad Primarch was indeed alive. Once, obeying fate, he had allowed an Imperial assassin to inflict mortal wounds upon him. Those injuries had healed over the long ages.

Only recently had he awakened in the coffin he had prepared for himself. After waking, he found a way back to his homeworld, where he encountered Corax, who had come to learn whether he still lived. The two lords of the night began a long hunt, each pursuing the other.