My Life as A Death Guard
Chapter 470: Extra: Confession of a Fool
"Are you willing to listen to the story of a sinner?"
The wind and snow howled. Endless darkness blanketed the wilderness, and the only campfire crackled softly, its dancing light illuminating a calm face.
At the very edge of the darkness, brilliant blue lights drifted like an aurora.
Hades sat expressionlessly beside the fire. This was the only source of light. He leaned against a fallen giant tree behind him, a tree that had once groaned as it collapsed at his back.
He did not care about the story of the tree, nor its past. At this very moment, billions upon billions of beings older and grander than this ancient trunk were falling into ruin—and Hades cared about none of them.
Expressionless, he waited beside the fire. Waiting. Silent.
Until the crunching sound of footsteps in snow rose behind him.
Hades ignored it.
A ragged red-haired figure sat down across from him. As though he had finally found a place to rest, he let out a long breath and removed the bloodstained bandage tied over his eyes. The filthy strip fell into the snow.
Magnus blinked his single eye. The firelight reflected within it, crimson brilliance overwhelming what remained of his original gaze.
The two said nothing.
Hades was like an ancient tree truly rooted in the forest itself—he simply existed there, silently growing.
Magnus took a deep breath. A bitter smile crept onto his lips. He scratched at his wild, tangled hair and casually picked up a bottle lying half-buried in the snow beside the fire.
It was a flat flask, just the right size for a Primarch to hold in one hand. Greasy grime clung to Magnus's fingers as the Crimson King curiously lifted it, and unsurprisingly found a line of Barbarus script etched into the bottom.
"So I wasn't the first after all." The red-haired giant muttered softly to himself. He pulled out the cork, and an overwhelmingly foul, acrid stench rushed straight into his face.
Magnus coughed violently several times, waving the air in front of him.
"I'd rather drink Russ's mead." As he spoke, Magnus turned and scanned the surroundings, as if searching for something—but apparently he failed to find whatever it was he wanted.
'You can do this,' Magnus reassured himself. At least there was still something here. Comforting himself with that thought, he hesitantly raised the bottle and drank Mortarion's garbage brew.
"—BLEGH—"
Magnus instantly regretted his decision. His tongue had touched no fewer than three insect antennae. Cursing Mortarion viciously, he immediately jammed the cork back in.
Drinking diesel directly would have been less painful on his tongue.
That damned liquid sludge felt like a lump of molten fire, slowly trickling down his throat in a single burning line. Magnus gagged, nearly wishing he could vomit out his own stomach.
The toxins invaded the Primarch's defenses, crawling over flesh and blood like swarming insects. Magnus shuddered. The internal damage caused by the poison left the Crimson King in a state of hazy-mindedness and flushed skin.
Fuck you, Mortarion, Magnus cursed inwardly. So internal bleeding and organ corrosion count as drunkenness now?
But admittedly, the Pale King's liquor truly did place Magnus into a state "similar to being drunk."
Magnus burped, expelling poisonous fumes from his stomach. He paused, then looked around blearily. The darkness remained unchanged.
"Fine," Magnus said with self-destructive resignation.
"I don't regret it."
"It's just…"
He nervously tightened his grip on the bottle in his hand, unconsciously opening it again.
Magnus stared at the silent Hades across from him, motionless as though he were some kind of cogitator lost in thought.
"There's still a part of me that He got, right?"
Magnus drew in a deep breath. He felt a chill crawling up his spine. The mere thought plunged him into an icy abyss. Reflexively, he took another swig of the poisonous liquor.
The red giant erupted into violent coughing again, loudly cursing Mortarion and sharply criticizing the thing he brewed as being worse than excrement.
"This is what he uses to force sinners into confessing?!" Magnus shouted.
"He doesn't even need to make them drink it—just opening the cork and letting them smell it is enough! By Prospero, I swear this thing deserves a place among the three most disgusting substances in the galaxy!"
Magnus ranted for quite a while. But afterward, he still felt uneasy, so he drank a few more mouthfuls.
This time, he fell silent.
"Well," Magnus muttered, shaking the bottle in his hand. Half a bottle of liquid sloshed around inside with a splash-splash sound.
Magnus carefully placed the bottle back beside the campfire.
Then he raised both hands innocently in surrender.
"I'll leave some for whoever comes after… though I suppose… what if I'm the last one? The most unfortunate bastard of them all?"
Naturally, Hades gave no response. Magnus knew that the "Hades" before him was merely some dull symbolic manifestation. The true Hades was this endless darkness itself.
"I don't regret it!"
Magnus suddenly shouted again. Realizing that, in a sense, he was the only intelligent being here, Magnus actually felt rather good.
"I—DON'T—REGRET—IT!" the Crimson King roared loudly. Sweat glistened across his face, his scarlet skin reflecting the firelight.
"It's just… it's just…"
He scratched uselessly at his tangled hair. What could he even say? He had nothing to say. When Magnus stood there, before the great tree of Fenris, what else could he have done?
Once again, he had simply been violently dragged out—from the fate he had already resigned himself to—and abruptly hurled back into cruel reality.
Though…
Magnus thought, at least this time he had been mentally prepared. It hadn't been like the first time—
He stared at Hades, raised a brow, and crossed his arms, as if recalling that moment during the Council of Nikaea.
Magnus let out a long sigh.
Well, at least it stopped him from doing anything stupid again.
What else could he have done? Faced with a naïve world-spirit and a barbarian who had pretended to be a savage for so long he had actually become one.
Magnus smacked his lips. His gaze drifted once more toward Mortarion's bottle.
Perhaps he should have simply remained in the wolves' prison and waited for death. No one expected anything from him. Everyone had urged him to stop acting altogether.
Even if he did nothing, for Magnus, his ending would have been the same.
He would become Tzeentch's puppet, spending millennium after millennium beneath the curses and hatred of others.
But, Magnus thought, he also couldn't… truly do nothing.
Having once stood face-to-face with the Emperor's wisdom, he understood what all of this meant.
The clearer one saw, the more despair one felt.
"What a difficult thing," Magnus sighed.
"You have no idea what I felt then—there are no words for it. It was as though I had returned to the night Tizca burned. I stood once more beneath the chaos-darkened sky of Tizca, trembling as I watched the Great Library consumed by flames."
"And I…"
Magnus stared at his own palm.
"Realized there was very little I could do."
He turned his hand over, almost as though discovering a new fascination, studying himself with his newly restored sight.
Magnus swallowed with difficulty.
"The future was fixed. The past was fixed. The prophecies I saw were real. And it was watching me all along. It even wanted me to see all of this."
"What a difficult moment that was."
But immediately afterward, his tone became lighter, almost triumphant.
"But you don't understand—I deceived everyone! Everyone—including that self-proclaimed all-knowing stupid bird!"
He spread his arms proudly, flaunting his own brilliance, though in this galaxy there were few beings left to witness it.
"At that very moment," Magnus said, "I was already prepared. It wasn't something I came up with on the spot—I clearly saw the formation of its threads. During those sunless days… I dissected everything. I chewed through everything. You can't imagine how unbearable those days were!"
Imprisoned. His Legion shattered. His sons imprisoned.
"But in the end, I succeeded!" Magnus shouted. His voice was torn apart by the darkness and vanished into the wilderness.
"I succeeded. I deceived God itself—at the cost of myself, at the cost of the last shred of goodness in the Warp. No one believed me—and of course I knew that, so I deceived them all!"
Magnus laughed as he spoke, laughing madly.
"No one believed me. That was the very foundation of my success."
Magnus laughed wildly into the darkness, arms stretched wide, but in the end his voice broke into sobs.
"I– I even sacrificed Fenris—"
Magnus said shatteredly.
"I– In the end… I too became the one who crushes hope. It was the only being that believed in me… It was so much like who I used to be. And I just… I just…"
Magnus began wailing.
"I betrayed it so easily, without the slightest hesitation—I didn't hesitate for even a moment!"
He had betrayed the person he once was.
Magnus let out a shattered scream.
"So this is why there are no benevolent beings in the Warp—I understand now! I understand completely! I was wrong—you were right! I was wrong!"
He looked at Hades provocatively, but the figure across from him never answered, and so the Crimson King deflated once more.
"But what does it matter…" Magnus said softly.
"You people never cared about these things, did you?"
"I saw through it long ago,"
Magnus shouted accusingly. "Damn pragmatists!"
He lowered his head in boredom, feeling restless again. Then he spotted the bottle. Without hesitation, Magnus picked it back up, took a savage swig, and flung it away with dramatic flair.
"Hic!" Magnus said. "Fine! I don't care anymore—my star shall forever be tarnished, cursed by billions, but I did it. I proved my worth to you damned pragmatists. Noble souls cannot survive upon this filthy soil; the noble are forced to live wearing the mask of clowns—I see it all clearly now."
Magnus inhaled deeply, his breath reeking of alcohol.
"I have already seen the thread of my fate. I, Magnus, the Crimson Sinner, shall forever remain a puppet of the gods, never to escape for all eternity."
He looked toward Hades.
"If you truly are the Lord of the Underworld—then cut apart my fate!" Magnus shouted.
His form flickered uncertainly, like a dancing flame. Then he vanished into the boundless darkness, never to be seen again.
The darkness rustled softly.
The freezing wind carried his final words:
"…Thank you."
And so the fire continued to burn.
<+>
Note:
Goodbye, Magnus
<+>
<+>
<+>
<+>
<+>
Tn: I updated the story daily, but if you want to see more chapter of this story ahead of time, please go to my Patreon.
Latest Chapter: Chapter 490: Slaanesh Decides to Go Have Some Fun[1]
Link: https://www.patreon.com/Thatsnakegirl/posts/my-life-as-death-160784510?collection=602520[2]
[1] https://www.patreon.com/Thatsnakegirl/posts/my-life-as-death-160784510?collection=602520
[2] https://www.patreon.com/Thatsnakegirl/posts/my-life-as-death-160784510?collection=602520