A Thousand Sons

by Graham McNeill

  Ahriman lifted the book from the iron chest, feeling the weight of power and expectation contained within its hallowed pages. The potency of the incantations and formulae called to him, alluring and redolent with promises of the great things he might achieve with the secrets inscribed upon its pages.

  He wanted to refuse, to place the book back in its chest and secure the lock so that no one would ever gaze upon its pages and crave the power it could grant. He wanted Magnus to return and retrieve his grimoire, but understood with sudden clarity that was never going to happen.

  Magnus had no expectation of surviving his duel with Leman Russ.

  Ahriman took the book and ran back to the bronze gates of the pyramid, desperation lending his strides greater speed. Brilliant flashes of light and thunderous impacts came from the other side of the gate, as colossal forces beyond mortal comprehension were unleashed.

  Ahriman reached the mighty portal, and saw a battle between two brothers that was unparalleled in its savagery, power and folly. Magnus and the Wolf King struggled with the fate of a world balanced on the outcome. Forking traceries of lightning shot upwards from the ground, isolating them from the host of Wolves and Custodes.

  Russ rained blow after blow on Magnus, shattering the horned breastplate, and in return Magnus struck his brother with a searing blast of cold fire that cracked his armour and set light to his braided hair.

  It seemed as though the combatants had swollen to enormous proportions, like the giants they were in the myths and legends. The Wolf King’s frostblade struck at Magnus, but his golden axe turned the blow aside as they spun and twisted in an epic battle beneath the madness of a blazing storm of sheet lightning and pounding thunder. This was a battle fought on every level: physical, mental and spiritual, with each primarch bending every ounce of their almost limitless power to the other’s destruction.

  The waters around the pyramid broke upon the shores, black as oil, and churning as though an unseen tempest boiled beneath the surface. Space Wolves and Custodes ploughed through the water, wading through the crashing spray to reach the pyramid in lieu of aiding Leman Russ in his battle. Magnus swept his hands to the side, and the warriors on the water cried out in agony as it transformed into corrosive acid, burning through ceramite plates and rendering flesh and bone to jelly.

  Thick rain fell, fit to drown the world, and the ground underfoot transformed into a stinking quagmire from which writhing shapes like grasping hands emerged. Wounded warriors were dragged down into the mud, struggling against their unseen attackers, but unable to resist being pulled under to their doom.

  Prospero was breaking apart, the veil between worlds cracking, and the maddening gibbers and screams of the Great Ocean’s denizens drove men to their knees in terror. The assault on the senses was total, and Ahriman could barely keep his feet as hurricane-force winds battered the pyramid, tearing glass panes from its structure and breaking the silver and gold towers from its corners. Thunder banged in the midnight sky, and heaving earthquakes ripped ever-widening cracks in the ground, toppling what few structures of Tizca remained standing.

  The epicentre of this destruction was Magnus and Russ, and Ahriman watched the two titans wrestle with the bitter enmity reserved only for those who had once called each other friend. Such a contest of arms was the most desperate thing Ahriman had ever seen. He wanted to rush forward and remind them of their former kinship, but to intervene in such a planet-shaking conflict would be suicide.

  Ahriman had cautioned his warriors not to wield their powers for fear of the flesh change, but Magnus showed no such restraint and battered Leman Russ with fists wreathed in fire and lightning. Russ was a primarch and such powers as could shatter armies had little effect on him save to drive him to higher fits of rage.

  Magnus drove his fist into Russ’ chest, the icy breastplate cracking open with a sound like planets colliding, and shards of ceramite stabbed the Wolf King’s heart. In return, Russ snapped Magnus’ arm back, and Ahriman heard it shatter into a thousand pieces. A blade of pure thought unsheathed from Magnus’ other arm, and he drove it deep into Russ’ chest through his shattered armour.

  The blade burst from Russ’ back and the Wolf King loosed a deafening bellow of pain. A chorus of the wolves that were not wolves added their howls to that of their master. The two enormous lupine monsters that accompanied Russ leapt upon Magnus, fastening their jaws upon his legs. Magnus slammed his fist into the black wolf’s head, driving it to the ground with a strangled yelp, its skull surely shattered. With a bellow of anger, Magnus tore the white wolf from his leg with a thought and hurled it away over the heads of the milling army at Russ’ back.

  Ahriman felt hands dragging him away as the howling winds and driving rain tore through the gates. He tried to shake them off as someone shouted his name. Hathor Maat and Amon pulled him away from the entrance as the vast mechanisms slowly began hauling the enormous gates closed.

  “No!” he shouted, his words snatched away by the screaming winds. “We can’t!”

  “We must!” shouted Hathor Maat, pointing towards the crashing waters separating the Space Wolves from the pyramid. Using the stocks of their bolters as paddles, the enemy had jury-rigged concave shards of roof debris to use as makeshift boats, and were surging over the waves towards the gateway. The water had returned to its natural state, frothed patches of liquefied flesh and bone scumming its surface the only reminder of the men who had died there. Hordes of Wulfen plunged into the water, entire packs pushing towards the pyramid with hundreds more right behind them.

  Ahriman looked past the approaching monsters to see Magnus and Russ locked in battle high above the causeway, the furious horror of their struggle obscured by ethereal fire and bursts of lightning. A flare of black light erupted and Russ cried out in agony. His blade lashed out blindly and struck a fateful blow against his foe’s most dreaded weapon: his eye.

  In an instant, the pyrotechnic cascade of light and fire was extinguished and a stunning silence swept outwards. All motion ceased, and the titans battling on the causeway were no more, each primarch now restored to his customary stature.

  Ahriman cried out as he saw Magnus reel back from the Wolf King, one hand clutched to his eye as his shattered arm crackled with regenerative energies. As broken and bloodied as Leman Russ was, he was brawler enough to seize his opportunity. He barrelled into Magnus and gripped him around the waist like a wrestler, roaring as he lifted his brother’s body high above his head.

  All eyes turned to Russ as he brought Magnus down across his knee, and the sound of the Crimson King’s back breaking tore through every warrior of the Thousand Sons’ heart.

  Ahriman fell to his knees, dropping the Book of Magnus as sympathetic pain, like a white-hot spear, stabbed through him. No pain in the world was worse, for this blow could unmake a primarch, and such wounds were a death-strike a hundred times over to any mortal warrior. He knelt against the closing gateway as the Wulfen packs reached the shoreline alongside warriors led by a bloody-fanged captain with burned hair and an ice-bladed axe.

  The Wolf King howled his triumph to the blackened heavens, and a rain of blood replaced the oil-black downpour as Prospero wept for her fallen son. Ahriman’s tears were bloody as Leman Russ dropped Magnus to the mud and brought the frostblade Mjalnar around to take the head of his defeated foe.

  With the last of his strength, Magnus turned his head, and his ravaged eye found Ahriman.

  This is my last gift to you.

  Leman Russ’ blade swept down, but before its lethal edge struck, Magnus whispered unnatural syllables unknown to Man since he had first raised his guttural chants to the nameless gods of the sky. Magnus’ body underwent an instantaneous dissolution, its entire structure unmade with a word, and Ahriman gasped as vast and depthless power surged into his body.

  It was too much for any mortal man to contain, but as it swept through him, he knew what he had to do.

  Ahriman clasped his hands upon the jade scarab set in his b
reastplate, filling his mind with its every curve and nuance, its imperfections, the intricacies of its golden mounting and the exact dimensions of the black scarab worked into its substance.

  He knew everything about that gem, and pictured the identical artefact on the chest of each warrior of the Thousand Sons. Even as he visualised them, the power in him spread to the entire Legion as Magnus gave the last of his strength to save his sons.

  A terrific groaning shattered the stillness, like the spine of the world shearing out of true. The sound of madness tore through the mundane substance of reality as the dying breath of a god unleashed power of impossible magnitude.

  The surface of Prospero twisted, and Ahriman felt a dreadful lurch of sickening vertigo. It felt like the bottom was falling out of the world, or like he was plunging down an endless shaft. The world vanished, replaced with the utter blackness at the end of the universe when all living things have been dust for billions of years.

  It was not silent, this blackness, but filled with myriad howls, as though hunting packs of wolves stalked the unseen corners between worlds with them. Was there to be no escape from the Emperor’s war dogs?

  With savage suddenness the impenetrable, lightless void was replaced with a swirling maelstrom of light and colour, blistering visions of hellish despair and unbridled ecstasy. Everything and nothing came in and out of the bond in moments, stretching out to infinity as the nightmare continued.

  Ahriman felt his grip on sanity slipping, the fragile notions of reality that mortals cling to snapping one by one as his mind was bombarded with a billion images at once.

  Mercifully, his mind hurled itself into unconsciousness lest it be blasted to psychosis by this unceasing barrage of sensation.

  Ahriman floated into the darkness, lost in space and time.

  This is the end.

  But it was not the end.

  Ahriman opened his eyes and found himself face down on a slab of jagged black rock. Every portion of his body was in pain, from his bruised and battered body to the very sinews of his mind. Flickering embers of light reflected on the gleaming obsidian ground and he groaned as he tried to piece together the last remnants of his memory.

  Thunder boomed overhead and crackling lightning threw strobing shadows out before him. Though his body protested with searing pain, Ahriman pushed himself into a kneeling position and looked around to see what had become of Prospero.

  His first thought was that the last work of Magnus had wrought a dreadful change upon their home world, but it soon penetrated his fractured mind that the sky was not that of Prospero. It boiled with storms of a million colours, jagged forks of light and fire dancing in crackling columns that reached from the ground to the clouds.

  He knelt upon the lower slope of an outcrop of black rock overlooking a broken volcanic plain ruptured with smoking fissures and threaded with glowing streams of lava. Gnarled fists of rock thrust up from the plain, their peaks topped with crooked silver towers that stood in mocking imitation of the graceful spires of Tizca. The leather-bound Book of Magnus lay beside him, and he tucked it protectively under his arm.

  Jagged mountain peaks soared into the shimmering sky that bellowed with peals of thunder. The sky hazed and shimmered like the most magnificent Mechanicum Borealis, but this was no side effect of centuries of pollution and industry. This was raw aether saturating the air and raging with oceanic tides of power.

  Warriors of the Thousand Sons wandered aimlessly across the broken rockscape in their hundreds, stunned at the desolation they found themselves in. Quaking discharges rumbled beneath the ground, as though an endless series of underground tremors constantly reshaped the planet’s core.

  Ahriman rose to his feet, surveying the nightmarish landscape of everlasting turmoil. A hunched figure shambled towards him, head down, and he recognised the battered form of Khaphed, one of the Lore-Keepers within the Corvidae library. In this hellish place, it was a blessed relief to see a familiar face.

  “Khaphed? Is that you?” asked Ahriman, feeling his speech fill the air with potential for wonders and raptures, as though every breath was charged with power.

  The warrior didn’t answer and Ahriman felt a dreadful force within Khaphed’s body. The Lore-Keeper’s head came up and Ahriman took a backward step as he saw the mutant growths that transformed Khaphed. Distended eyes pushed their way from every surface on the warrior’s face, such that there was no longer a mouth, nose or any other sense organ other than eyes.

  Khaphed reached for him, his myriad eyes silently imploring him for help.

  Ahriman thrust his hand towards Khaphed and unleashed a barrage of fire and lightning into the Lore-Keeper’s body. Such powers were the provenance of the Raptora and Pavoni, but they leapt from Ahriman’s fingers as naturally as though he had been trained by those cults since birth.

  Khaphed’s charred body collapsed and shattered into ashen fragments as it hit the ground.

  Horrified, Ahriman ran down the slopes to rejoin the rest of his warriors.

  HE FOUND HATHOR Maat, Amon and Sobek quickly enough, but it soon became clear that the Lore-Keeper of the Corvidae was not the only member of the Legion to have succumbed to the flesh change. Dozens more required to be put down, until at last all that remained appeared to be free of mutation.

  All told, twelve hundred and forty-two warriors had survived the razing of Prospero.

  “Where are we?” asked Sobek, raising the most obvious question.

  No one had an answer, and for long days and nights, though it was impossible to gauge the passage of time since everyone’s armour chrono had failed, the Thousand Sons explored the hideous desolation that was their new home.

  The silver towers were discovered not to be parodies of those that had been raised on Tizca, but those selfsame towers, broken and twisted by the strange alchemy that had brought them to this place. Beyond these relics of their lost home world, there was nothing to shed any light on the nature of the place.

  No power of the Corvidae or any other cult could fathom its location or any hint of how they had come to be deposited upon its blasted surface.

  All that changed on the day the Obsidian Tower rose from the depths.

  IT BEGAN WITH yet another earthquake, a common enough occurrence that no one paid any mind at first. A sullen mood had fallen upon the Thousand Sons, which was wholly expected, for what manner of man would not keenly feel the loss of his home, father and brothers?

  But this earthquake did not simply fade away after splitting yet another fissure in the endless volcanic plain while sealing another shut. Cracks spread from the centre of the plain in a radial pattern and a black diamond, like a thrusting basalt speartip, exploded upwards.

  It rose into the sky, pushing higher and higher and growing wider and wider with every passing moment until a new mountain had been birthed. Towering and steep-sided, it rose higher than Olympus Mons and the Mountain of Aghoru combined. Broken rocks tumbled from its impossible height, falling from its angular sides to craft a fringe comprising shattered Cyclopean stone and titanic blocks of strange angles and impossible perspectives.

  When the rain of dust and debris had ended, the Thousand Sons gathered at the base of this stupendous creation, knowing that nothing natural could have created so magnificent an edifice. Glowing fire arced from the distant mountain’s peak and a shimmering blue light suffused its entirety, as though lightning filled its tunnels like blood in a circulatory system.

  A bright shape descended from the mountaintop, a wavering and indistinct form wreathed in the light of stars and the power of infinite possibility. Brilliant wings of shimmering aetheric fire unfolded from the figure’s back, and the Thousand Sons fell to their knees as their father’s light spread over them.

  Magnus landed softly before his sons and they stared in amazement as his light illuminated the bleak darkness of the world. This was no corporeal shell of a subtle body as worn by the primarch when he had walked among them. This was a body of light that cou
ld exist beyond the confines of the Great Ocean. Magnus had sacrificed the flesh that had contained his essence, and in so doing had ascended to a more evolved form, one free from the constraints of mortality and the limits of reality.

  “My sons,” said Magnus with weary resignation, “welcome to the Planet of the Sorcerers.”

  Time has passed.

  Centuries or days, who can know?

  It may be both and neither at the same time.

  I cannot say how long has passed since we first came here, for I have come to appreciate that such concepts are an irrelevance here. All I know is that things have become immeasurably worse since the Obsidian Tower first reared its ugly immensity from the earth. Some say we could not have guessed that this world would have worked its evil upon us. I say: How could we not have known?

  Hathor Maat fears it the worst, but I confess I too suffer the nightmarish dread that one day I will become less than nothing, a devolved creature with nothing left of the man I once was. Some even embrace their new forms, believing them to be marks of favour.

  Fools.

  It has become ever more rife amongst our number, and seventy-two warriors have succumbed to the flesh change since Magnus first spirited us away from Prospero.

  Spirited… An old word, but an apt one perhaps, for we did not arrive on this desolate world by accident. This planet was waiting for us, prepared aeons ago by an intelligence greater than anyone, primarch or mortal, can possibly comprehend.

  Magnus broods in his black tower, peering into the depths of the Great Ocean for validation, a sign that he was right to act as he did.

  He will find nothing, for there is nothing to find.

  His actions were never his own, for he forgot the first rule of the mysteries.

  He let his ambition and hubris blind him to his flaws and the knowledge that there is always someone stronger and more powerful out there.