I hit the ground hard enough to kill a continent.
The impact punched the air from lungs that were not mine. For one merciful heartbeat everything was black again, and I thought maybe the fall had finished the job the ramen started.
Then the pain arrived.
It came in layers. First the bones, too many bones, too thick, grinding together like millstones. Then the skin, armor fused to flesh, burning where it touched and burning colder where it didn't. Finally the memories, someone else's memories, pouring into me like molten lead.
I saw a green world burning.
I saw angels with broken wings falling upward into a white sky.
I saw a sword the size of a city carving a canyon through Hell itself.
I screamed. The sound that came out cracked the crust of the planet for fifty kilometers in every direction.
When the dust settled I was on my knees in a crater that steamed with molten glass. My hands, no, his hands, were planted in the slag. Each finger was longer than my old body, wrapped in crimson gauntlets that dripped something darker than blood.
I tried to stand and the world tilted. Thirteen feet tall. Maybe fourteen. Gravity felt negotiable.
Something heavy shifted against my back. Metal groaned. A chain clinked.
Chaoseater.
The name arrived in my head fully formed, the way you remember your own childhood address. The sword was awake and impatient, pressing against my spine like a cat that wants to be fed.
I reached over my shoulder on pure reflex, and the chain snapped like cobweb. The blade slid free with a sound that tasted like rust.
It was beautiful in the way black holes are beautiful. Six feet of living murder, the edge flickering between real and not-real. Runes crawled across the fuller like ants made of dying stars.
The moment my fingers closed around the hilt, the screaming started.
Not mine.
Ten million voices, maybe a billion, all inside the steel. Men, women, children, angels, demons, things that had never had names. Every life the sword had ever taken, still bleeding, still begging.
I dropped it.
The sword hit the ground and buried itself to the hilt, as if the planet itself wanted to hide.
I stared at my empty hand. It was shaking.
A shadow fell across the crater.
I looked up.
An ork, easily twice my old height, covered in scrap armor and dried gore, stood at the crater's lip. A chainaxe the size of a motorcycle revved in its fists. Behind it, hundreds more. Thousands. A green tide stretching to the horizon under a sky the color of infection.
The big one grinned, tusks yellow and broken.
"RED WUN," it bellowed, voice thick with joy. "YA CAME BACK FER MORE DAKKA!"
I opened my mouth to say I'm not him, to say please, to say anything at all.
My body moved without me.
Chaoseater tore free of the earth and flew to my hand like it had been waiting its entire existence for this moment.
The first ork reached me in three strides.
I watched from very far away as my arm moved in a perfect, practiced arc that had ended civilizations before breakfast.
The nob's head left its shoulders and kept grinning all the way to the ground.
Hot blood painted my breastplate. Some of it splashed across the inside of the hood. It tasted like copper and old guilt.
More came. They were laughing. Actually laughing.
My body laughed with them.
I felt the Rider wake up fully for the first time, something vast and ancient stretching inside my ribs like a dragon uncoiling.
No, I thought. No no no—
The sword rose again.
The slaughter began.
I counted thirty-seven swings before I stopped being able to count.
Somewhere around the hundredth body I started crying inside the helmet. The tears steamed away before they reached my chin.
When it was over I stood in a ring of meat and smoke. The sword dripped. The voices inside it sang.
I looked down and saw small white flowers pushing up through the blood, perfect and impossible.
They hadn't been there a minute ago.
I knelt, because my legs decided they were done holding me up, and stared at the flowers like they were the first kind thing the universe had ever done.
A tiny voice, human and terrified, came from the edge of the carnage.
"Mister… are you an angel?"
I turned.
A girl, maybe eight years old, stood between two severed ork torsos. Her face was ash and tears. She clutched a broken laspistol that was still too big for her.
I tried to tell her to run.
What came out was the Rider's voice, low and final.
"Angels are dead, child."
She flinched but didn't run. She looked at the flowers, then at me.
"They're pretty," she whispered.
I looked at my hands. They were steady now. Covered in someone else's war.
For the first time since I died, I felt something other than terror.
Shame.
I stood. The sword dragged behind me, carving a furrow through the dead.
The girl followed at a distance.
I didn't tell her to stop.
Behind us, the white flowers kept blooming, drinking the blood like it was rain.
Ahead, the sky was full of drop-pods burning red as they fell.
I started walking toward them.
The sword was happy.
I was not.
But the flowers kept growing.
And for reasons I couldn't name, that was enough to keep me moving.
For now.