Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero

by Graham McNeill

  A sudden stillness and a moment of silence isolated Ahriman.

  He heard a voice whisper into his mind.

  +My favoured son…+

  'I hear you,' said Ahriman, turning and feeling a heart filled with regret and guilt coming from deeper into the chamber. The urge to break the mandala was overpowering, though it fought against every aspect of his training that told him to maintain it.

  'What did you say?' said Phosis T'kar.

  'I have to go to him,' said Ahriman.

  'Who?'

  'Our father. He spoke to me.'

  Phosis T'kar heard Ahriman's certainty and nodded.

  'Spearhead!' he yelled, and the Thousand Sons transitioned swiftly into their assault formation: a fighting wedge of ceramite and steel, a thrust of psychic might and genhanced strength.

  Ahriman took position at the tip of the spear as Hathor Maat - or, rather, the thing that wore his flesh - stepped from a corona of psychic fire. Power haloed his brother, crude in comparison to what the true Hathor Maat could wield, but potent nonetheless.

  'Pavoni power in the wind,' yelled Phosis T'kar.

  Ahriman felt a sickening ache in his marrow, a restless ambition within his flesh. A fist of nausea clenched his gut as his cells responded to the mutant urge encoded in the earliest stages of their being.

  He willed his flesh to stillness, but the corpses hanging from the shattered cryo-tubes had no such imperative to resist. Rotten, centuries-dead meat jerked to spasmodic life as aether energy suffused glossy, jellied limbs.

  One by one, the sodden corpses pulled free from their shattered glass tubes, held aloft by the psychic strings of a mad puppeteer. The light of the Great Ocean burned in gaping eye sockets, and dead fluids drooled from slack jaws.

  Hundreds of the resurrected surrounded them, and more were lurching from their cryo-tubes with every passing moment.

  'Bloody Pavoni,' sighed Phosis T'kar.

  Neon-bright pillars of radiance pierced the sky and etched themselves against the darkness. The clouds burned to vapour as collimated beams of orbital weaponry banished night and illuminated Morningstar for a thousand kilometres in all directions.

  The orbital barrage fell in a cascade of macro-lasers and atomic fire. As with everything the Iron Warriors did, it was relentless, thorough and merciless.

  Perturabo felt the shock waves from the destruction of the world-killing machinery a second after the flash dimmed the glass of the Stormbird's canopy. The gunship shuddered as the toroidal pressure wave sought to tear it from the sky.

  He gripped the control column and kept them pointed back towards Calaena as a continental-scale firestorm ignited over what remained of the planet's oceans.

  'To unleash such devastation usually brings me a sense of vindication,' said Perturabo, 'a sense that some great evil had been defeated.'

  'You don't feel that?' asked Barban Falk.

  'No, I feel nothing. This has achieved nothing.'

  'We knew that going in,' pointed out Falk.

  'I knew this vengeance would be symbolic, but I still assumed I would feel a measure of satisfaction at striking back.'

  'And you don't?'

  'No, because we have already lost this fight. It was lost before we even made planetfall. Our enemies on Morningstar are beyond my ability to punish. To kill them would only fulfil their desire to die.'

  'Then what are we to do?'

  'We save as many innocents as we can, then leave this world and never look back.'

  Falk nodded and turned back to the console as urgent comm-chatter sparked over the vox. The storms and electromagnetic fallout from the orbital barrage made sifting the signal from the interference next to impossible, but Barban Falk was a master at extracting meaning from chaos.

  His fingers danced over the controls, and howling interference filled the cockpit until the voice of Harkor was rendered in scratching, wavering static.

  under attack… breached the gates. The bastards are inside the Sharei Maveth! Systems failing throughout… no… thousands of them. Don't… preparing to fight—

  The transmission was abruptly cut off and Perturabo and Falk shared a look of disbelief that an Iron Warriors fortress could have been breached by mortals.

  'Remember everything I just said about our enemies being beyond our ability to punish?'

  'Yes?' said Falk.

  'I was wrong,' said Perturabo. 'These bastards will pay in blood for this, and I am going to enjoy every second of it.'

  The golden helm enclosed Magnus' head and he felt the touch of electrodes at his temples. They buzzed with current. His mouth filled with moisture. He tasted metal.

  'You don't need to do this,' he said, as a host of needles pressed through his hair to prick his scalp.

  'Everyone who lies on these slabs says that,' said Shai-Tan.

  'You don't - I can help you.'

  'How is it you think you can help us?' said Shai-Tan, the light of its rage burning in Atharva's eyes. 'Can you imagine the obscenity of what was done here? Thousands of innocents, whose only crime was to be born capable of miracles, were stripped of their uniqueness. Many did not survive the process, but those that did soon wished they had died. Imagine a painter losing his eyes overnight, a virtuoso musician shattering the bones in her hands or a singer with the most sublime voice struck dumb. That is what they did to us, and you think you can help?'

  Magnus let Shai-Tan's words wash through him, their remembered pain breaking his heart. He sifted the myriad splintered moments for a singular truth, searching for a way to free Atharva and the others, a way to undo what had been done here He closed his eye, letting his mind absorb Shai-Tan's pain, reliving it over and over through the memories of all those who had suffered here. When he opened it again, it was to see an echo of the past…

  The medicae chamber was as it had once been, pristine white and sterile, a place of terrible psychic surgery.

  Magnus looked up through the memory of the woman who had lain on this gurney before him. He wept as he experienced her terror and incomprehension at what was being done. Anonymous men in protective suits of vulcanised rubber, wearing rebreather masks and obscuring visors, loomed over her. They bore needles and psychically caustic drugs.

  He gagged on the plastek mouth guard intended to keep her from biting her tongue. He thrashed as they fitted burning needles and clamps to her head. He clawed at their faces and managed to pull clear the mask of her nearest tormentor. Magnus looked into his unremarkable features, seeing not the face of a monster, but a frightened, guilty man.

  Magnus plunged deep into this man's mind, learning everything about him in the space of a breath - his hopes and his dreams, and everything that made him human. But the truth of mortal minds lay not in their dreams, but coiled in their fears.

  What terrors had consumed the settlers of this world…?

  And the answer to the question he had posed to Perturabo when they began their mission to Morningstar was starkly clear.

  Magnus released his hold on the woman's memories of past horror and flew back to the present, drawing a great draught of chemical-rich air into his lungs. Pain throbbed at his temples and glacial cold filled his immobile limbs.

  The electrodes within the golden helm pulsed with burning current, blackening the skin beneath. Wetness coated his scalp as the rotating needles eased inwards, millimetre by millimetre. His thoughts were sluggish. The low-level buzz of insects filled his skull.

  Magnus bit back the pain. 'I know why they did this to you.'

  'Because they feared us,' snapped Shai-Tan. 'And because fear leads to hate, they stripped us of our abilities.'

  'No,' said Magnus. 'That wasn't it. That wasn't it at all.'

  'Then why?' demanded Shai-Tan. 'Tell me why they did this to us, why they let so many of us die, screaming in terror, or left broken and mad? Tell me what reason could possibly have justified all this?'

  'Old Night..! gasped Magnus as the needles met the resistance of bone


  'Old Night?' said Shai-Tan.

  'An age of strife and bloodshed like nothing seen before,' said Magnus. 'A wave of mass insanity that swept through human space, consuming entire worlds in a galactic extinction event.'

  The electrodes were burning Magnus' skin, the needles boring into his skull. He felt the sting of the psychoactive chemicals at their tips begin to spread into his bloodstream.

  How much longer did he have before his thought processes became too disconnected to reach Shai-Tan?

  'Humanity was evolving too quickly,' he said. 'The emergence of so many with the psyker gene was too sudden, too drastic. It could only end in disaster. The mass insanity… It manifested through the psykers, infecting whole worlds and plunging them into an abyss of ruin and death.'

  'No…' said Shai-Tan.

  'What they did here? It was terrible and monstrous and beyond all reach of morality, yes, but it made Morningstar a world without psykers. The killing madness never took hold in this place. It had no way in, no victims to infect. The planet's populace were immune. Old Night never fell.'

  'You lie,' said Shai-Tan.

  'Look inside my mind. See for yourself.'

  Shai-Tan stepped back, its stolen features twisted in dawning comprehension. Magnus felt its fury ebb, before it surged back, more ferocious than ever.

  'They saved the world,' said Magnus.

  'At the cost of our lives!' shouted Shai-Tan.

  'When you love something with every fragment of your soul, you will sacrifice anything to save it.'

  'Anything?' said Shai-Tan.

  'Anything. Trust me on this,' said Magnus, before roaring in pain as the full power of the ancient machinery shrieked within the vault of his skull.

  It was unlike anything he had experienced or could have imagined. It burned the meat of his mind, cauterising delicate psychic nodes and disrupting synaptic networks of arcane configurations.

  Magnus spasmed as the very essence of what made him unique amongst his brothers was drawn out of his mind like blood from a vein. The edges of the world grew dimmer, less vivid and defined. To see the world as those without seersight saw it filled Magnus with gut-wrenching horror.

  Shai-Tan gripped his throat, as if seeking to choke the life from him as well as sever him from his power, a maddened god exacting pain for pain, as if the scales could ever be balanced.

  Magnus fought against the force holding him down, his agony and the terror of being without his power lending strength to his limbs. His hand clamped around Atharva's gorget and he squeezed. The metal and ceramite cracked, but Shai-Tan only increased the pressure on his neck.

  Locked together in a lethal embrace, they were beings with the power of gods fighting a battle to the death: neither willing to surrender, both willing to meet their end.

  Movement caught Magnus' eye, blurred and hazed by pain and the ruptured capillaries misting his vision with blood. He saw kine blades rising and falling, whipping arcs of psionic light, warriors in crimson plate awash with smoke and blazing auras. A host of dead, pallid-skinned golems surrounded them.

  Leading them was a warrior wreathed in amber fire, his radiance like that of the pious saints depicted on the ceilings of ancient temples.

  'Ahzek…' gasped Magnus. 'My favoured son…'

  Ahriman charged Shai-Tan, firing his bolter from the hip before reaching for his combat blade when the slide racked back on an empty breech.

  Shai-Tan looked up and lifted one of his hands from Magnus' neck. A pale nimbus of light, like the glow of the dawn's first star, built around his fingers and exploded outwards in a series of spiralling comets.

  The explosive psychic impact filled the chamber with blinding light Magnus cried out as Ahriman was tossed through the air to land limply across one of the slabs. He looked up into Atharva's face, seeing ethereal masks of spite-filled souls revelling in the pain they had caused.

  Ahriman's assault had achieved only a momentary distraction, but it was all the opening that Magnus needed.

  Resolve settled in his bones, resolve he had known he lacked until now.

  'I will save you,' he said, wrenching his other hand free to tear loose Shai-Tan's grip on his neck. 'If you let me.'

  A kine pulse of thought pushed the needles from his skull and Magnus sat bolt upright as Shai-Tan recoiled.

  'Your power is great, but it is undisciplined,' he said, twisting Atharva's wrist and snapping it with a sickening crack of bone. The souls within Atharva screamed at this reversal. Magnus rolled and shrugged Atharva from him like a brawler pinning his opponent to the floor.

  He held Atharva to the slab, one hand around his neck, the other poised in a fist above him.

  'I am Magnus, Master of Prospero, and I was taught by the Emperor of Man, the greatest psyker in the galaxy,' he said, looking deep within Shai-Tan. 'Against that, you have nothing!'

  Atharva's body convulsed beneath him, wild psychic energy contorting his limbs in unnatural ways as Shai-Tan fought Magnus' iron discipline. He felt fury snapping at him, an eternal anger that knew no forgiveness. Magnus nodded, as if coming to a solemn decision within himself.

  'I am sorry, my son,' he said. 'There is no other way.'

  The golden helm snapped down over Atharva's head and shimmered with power as the needles punched deep into his skull.

  'Hold to your silver cord!' cried Magnus as a looming vision of a dreadful, faceless angel burned itself on his mind. 'Hold fast to it and never let go, or it will be your end.'

  Magnus closed his eye, but could not cut himself off from the awful sound of his son's pain and fear. He heard the drilling needles pierce bone and felt the burning honor of the chemicals, neuro-scramblers and gemynd-shears doing their grisly work within Atharva's skull.

  Shai-Tan screamed as it once again endured the agonies that had birthed it, the horror of being torn from a body of flesh and blood.

  It fled Atharva and surged into the aether as a billowing storm of hate and fury. Magnus saw it as a swirling red maelstrom, a daemon of nightmare taking shape in a psychic storm that burned the air with its fury.

  He had been waiting for Shai-Tan to abandon its host and stood before its swelling storm fury with one arm thrust forwards, the other flat upon the great grimoire chained to his waist.

  Shai-Tan howled and the deck plates buckled with its violence Magnus remained upright as hurricane winds of psychic force sought to dash him against the walls. He rooted himself to the spot, an immoveable object in the face of inesistible force

  'What happened here was unforgivable,' said Magnus. 'I promise it will be remembered. You will all be remembered.'

  He thrust his grimoire towards Shai-Tan's essence and its cover of red leather flew open like a portal to other worlds. Shai-Tan shrieked and fought against the pull of the Book of Magnus, but the grimoire's depthless thirst for learning was like an irresistible ocean vortex.

  'All who died in these halls will live again,' promised Magnus. 'Let go of the hate and you will be born anew in a realm of limitless imagination.'

  The strongest souls within Shai-Tan's essence resisted, unwilling to let go of their hatred, but more and more were accepting Magnus' offer with every passing second.

  Magnus drew them all into the book - a litany of names and lives, a record of the dead and the forgotten. He was their conduit, and he experienced their lives in the space of a heartbeat as he offered them a future.

  And pages replete with ancient tales of magic and legends were enriched with a new cast of characters, fresh players to strut upon the stages of strange and mythical lands. Within the pages of Magnus' book the stolen souls of Morningstar would live incredible lives and experience untold adventure.

  The cover of the book slammed shut and the hurricane winds vanished in an instant. Magnus let out a shuddering breath and sank to his knees as sudden stillness fell across the chamber.

  The bodies of the dead and his enslaved sons fell to the deck, now freed from Shai-Tan's controlling force.

&n
bsp; 'My lord?' said a voice, and Magnus looked up to see Ahzek Ahriman staring at him. 'Is it over?'

  Magnus placed a hand upon his grimoire and thought of what he had learned in his connection to Shai-Tan. His shoulders slumped, as if the greatest burden imaginable had just been placed upon him.

  'No,' he said. 'There is one last dark deed before us.'

  'What dark deed?' asked Ahriman.

  'To finish what was begun,' said Magnus.

  Epilogue

  Refugee vessels glittered in the light of the doomed world, an ad-hoc fleet of well over a thousand ships of all sizes and displacement. It was a fleet of desperation, every vessel packed with the indigenous survivors of Morningstar. Shuttles still ferried people back and forth, segregating natives from non-natives.

  Magnus and Perturabo watched from the command deck of the Iron Blood as Legion vessels manoeuvred around the fleet like shepherds guarding a flock from predators.

  Perturabo's flagship was a place of functionality, yet its arches were gracefully formed over latticed ironwork. Magnus recognised many of the decorative flourishes from the plans he had seen etched on wax paper in his brother's workshop.

  Warriors in burnished plate stood at their command stations like iron sculptures, ready to enact their primarch's orders the instant they were given. No one spoke. The only sound was the buzz of cogitators and the constant thrum of the engines through the deck plates.

  Perturabo's armour was still bloody from the fighting in the Sharei Maveth and still radiated heat from action. It had taken all Magnus' considerable powers of persuasion to convince Perturabo to abandon his fortress. It railed against every fibre of his brother's soul to leave a fight unfinished, and the look in his eyes when they met atop the landing platforms of the embattled fortress told Magnus the matter lay between them like an impassable gulf.

  Forrix and Harkor's squads had held the gates to the upper levels while the Iron Warriors and Thousand Sons evacuated the Sharei Maveth. And with every gunship that blasted into orbit, Magnus felt a little of his brother's love for him diminish.

  Barban Falk had emerged from the fighting, dragging the bloodied, struggling form of Konrad Vargha behind him. At first Magnus thought the warrior was rescuing him, but then he read the truth of the situation in the man's aura.