‘Detonation,’ Vahiel reported. ‘It looks like–’
The sound that cut him off was greater than the explosion. Sanguinius heard the deep-throated thunder of the blast. He pictured the nexus shattering, the conduits flying back in shards as the energy they transported was unleashed when the melta bombs ruptured their integrity. That was the material explosion. It was barely audible beneath the other sound. That sound, the one that silenced Vahiel and daemons alike, was the sudden wail in the heart of the song. The symphony of the manufactorum broke into a momentary cacophony. The words crumbled before they could finally be spoken. A mountain screamed. The dark miracle that fed the great gate above the planet stumbled in its operation. Even Chaos could be disrupted, and it was now. The shriek of the music ended quickly. Junctions elsewhere took on more labour, and the work of destroying reality resumed.
In the space of those few seconds, though, for the duration of the wail, Sanguinius felt the complex shudder like a stabbed animal. The pain went deep, much further than the immediate vicinity of the nexus.
After the shriek, the mournful insanity of the song resumed. From the rear came the rumble of collapsing stone and metal.
‘The chamber is gone,’ said Vahiel. ‘There’s been a major collapse.’
Sanguinius voxed the captains of the other companies. ‘Our strategy is bearing fruit. Destroy the large junctions.’ The desert scorpion of Baal was a juggernaut in its armour. A single spear could do nothing against it. But strike it with many, and it would fall. Enough spears would kill the foundry too.
‘We have our prey,’ Amit responded. ‘You will hear our blow very soon.’
The tunnel split ahead, the equally large branches turning left and right. The left-hand path took a steep descent. The roaring of the daemon horde came from there. Sanguinius chose it, wondering why there was still no sign of the foe. The Blood Angels had travelled two miles since the first blast. The volume of the howls was no longer increasing.
‘Lord primarch, are they retreating?’ Azkaellon asked.
‘It doesn’t sound as if they are, does it?’ said Sanguinius. It was more likely an auditory distortion created by the web of tunnels. There was so much unnatural about the manufactorum, a deceptive quality to the sound would hardly be surprising.
Perhaps he had been wrong to think a daemon army guarded this path. At least the conduits were as numerous as the first tunnel. Sooner or later, there would be another junction.
The terrible song hesitated again, and then again. Two other companies of Blood Angels had destroyed their first targets. Both times, Sanguinius heard and felt the deep tremor shake the manufactorum. ‘We are damaging this terrible place,’ he voxed the Legion. ‘It knows us. Soon it will fear us, because it will know we have come to kill it.’ But how many spears will it take? he wondered. For all that the Blood Angels had advanced quickly, they had barely broken the skin of the huge forge. There could be hundreds of miles between Sanguinius’ current position and the core. If there was a core.
The slope became steeper. The floor writhed. Sanguinius listened to the song more carefully, hoping to find that it was waning, a hint that the damage was starting to matter.
He found something else instead. The whisper was emerging again, more distinctly than before, as if the wounded animal were desperate to cry out. The words would not be stopped. There were syllables now. They were so slow, long seconds passing between each consonant and vowel, that their refrain was hard to distinguish.
At the next intersection, Sanguinius paused. He listened for the whisper now. It seemed more localised than the rest of the song. The full symphony did not change in volume depending on the route taken. It was the voice of the entire manufactorum, and its voice was everywhere. The whisper was getting louder. And it was getting faster. It slipped out between the pause in the manufactorum’s intakes of breath with such sudden clarity that Sanguinius wondered how he could not have known it for what it was from the start.
It was his name.
‘Lord primarch?’ Azkaellon asked as, with a wounded snarl, Sanguinius plunged down the left tunnel in pursuit of the voice.
‘Can you hear it?’ asked Sanguinius.
‘The song, my lord?’
‘No, the whisper.’
Azkaellon said nothing for a moment, listening. ‘I hear no whisper.’
‘Raldoron?’ Sanguinius called. ‘Can you still hear the voices?’
‘No, my lord.’
‘Then it is for my ears alone. The enemy is preparing a more insidious attack.’ The thought came that the daemonic power that held the manufactorum might not be on the defensive at all. Sanguinius dismissed the pessimism. The wounds were real. The music had fractured.
Sanguinius followed the hissing syllables of his name. It summoned him, and he answered. I do not die here, he thought. My end will come, but today, I am the one who brings the end.
Daemons roared in the distance, always in the distance, always around the next bend, but never arriving.
At last the corridor narrowed and made a sharp turn to the right. It ended in another nexus chamber. In the chamber was a single abomination; it stood before the junction of conduits. It was kin to the one Sanguinius and the herald had fought outside the manufactorum. It was taller, its horns longer, but the muscle-pink of its hide was the same. It carried a staff instead of a sword, and this it held at the vertical. Its other two hands held a book. Sanguinius did not know if it was the same tome or not. He didn’t care. The daemon appeared to want him to care. It held the book open. It held it forwards, arms extended, an invitation Sanguinius would decline.
A nimbus of warp energy surrounded the daemon. It dissipated as the Blood Angels came into view. As the energy vanished, the sounds of the daemon army fell into silence. The illusion of the multitude evaporated.
‘So this is our ambush,’ said Azkaellon. ‘A single foe.’ He sounded very suspicious.
‘Kano?’ Sanguinius asked. He advanced slowly into the chamber. Several hundred yards separated him from the daemon. He saw no other abominations lying in wait.
‘I sense only the one we see,’ the Librarian voxed.
Sanguinius hesitated. The daemon was motionless. It did not attack. It held the book, and that was all. It had lured him here. It must know what he planned to do. It could not think it would be enough to stop the entire company.
His choices were few. He had come to destroy the nexus. That imperative had not changed.
Sanguinius halted less than fifty feet into the chamber. He would not be part of the design being woven. ‘Fire on the nerve cluster from this position,’ Sanguinius commanded. ‘Ignore the daemon.’
The sorcerous light returned, and a sudden nova burst from the book. It shot up and behind the daemon, striking the nexus.
‘Back!’ Sanguinius ordered.
The conduits disintegrated. Coruscating, murderous light burst from them. It formed a contained ball of energy, blinding in intensity, its convulsions scraping at the mind like claws. It fused tighter, drawing in on itself. It imploded, and now, where the junction had been, was a single point of warp light.
Oh, Sanguinius thought, and then the light came for him.
The beam struck him in the eyes.
There was a moment of absolute void and then there was a maelstrom of creation, an uncontrolled explosion of being without form. He dropped down its eye, into dark. He fell through blackness veined with red and green and blue and violet, the colours of ruin entwined and cutting into his mind like wire.
He did not land, but he stopped falling. He floated in the black. The darkness became mist, gathered definition, and became the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit. He was there again, as present as he had been when he had slipped between realities on the Red Tear. And again, Horus struck him down.
The pain again. The pain of final dissolution. He felt himsel
f die, and he felt the grief at treachery and the grief of failure, the grief that his death was meaningless. There was no doubt now. He died, and Horus won, and that was all.
He fell into the dark, and light pierced it again; it became shadows and then substance again, and once more Horus towered over him. Once more, Horus slew him.
The pain, the grief, the futility… It was all there again.
And then again.
And again.
And again.
He lived his final moment over and over. The pain never diminished. Each iteration of his doom was as excruciating as the last. He tried to turn his head as the Vengeful Spirit materialised. He was confronted with the same perspective. He groaned, and with a wrenching effort of will, he turned his back on Horus. He spun himself away from the vision, though he heard the sound of his boots against the deck.
The effort was futile. He turned and turned and turned, and he died and he died and he died. There was no escape, no meaning, no hope. Each time Horus killed him, he saw a trace of the future that would come. Every death brought its consequences. None were repeated. All were terrible. Horus was endlessly triumphant. All that changed was his immediate route to power.
Sanguinius spun faster, the movement no longer of his volition, and he saw endless iterations of his fate at once, as if he were in a mirror corridor, with the same image reflected to infinity. But this was more than an image. It was real. He died a thousand times at once, and the pain was a thousand times amplified.
A new blackness rose. This one was his. It came from within. It was anger that dwarfed the pain. Its jaws were immense, jagged with fangs, breathing flame and hatred. It consumed him, and yet the jaws were his too. With them, he would repay the treacherous galaxy with blood. He roared in an agony of wrath as the images of his death endlessly repeated. Darkness within lashed at the darkness without. Deep in his mind, buried in the agony, a sliver of his identity protested. It did not want this thing he had become. It rejected the black monster that claimed him as its father. His last piece of rationality reached out in desperation for any trace of hope. It flashed through the deaths upon deaths upon deaths, becoming weaker and dimmer as it looked for any meaning, any sign of doom leading to consequences other than eternal night for the Imperium.
At last, the hope appeared. In the infinite variations of the battle against Horus, there was one that challenged predestined death. One vision was different. Only one. In it, Sanguinius dodged the death blow. Horus put so much power into it that he overbalanced when he missed. There was a fraction of a second of hesitation as he sought to correct his momentum. Sanguinius seized the chance, and drove the Blade Encarmine up. It found the weakened point in Horus’ gorget. It pierced his armour.
It pierced his throat.
It pierced his skull.
This was the outcome Sanguinius had never even dreamed of, because the entire foundations of his destiny were built upon its denial. In this one vision, the terrible blackness withered, collapsed and broke apart into whirling ash. Here, and only here, there was hope. Here, and only here, the Imperium did not fall. Here, and only here, the Emperor’s dream lived on.
Like the coils of a monstrous serpent, the continuum of dooms gathered around Sanguinius. They came to strangle the single hope. They came to destroy the thing that turned them from certainties into mere possibilities. The visions formed a knot around Sanguinius and the image of light. It tightened. The wrenching anger rose once more, fastening its grip on his being. When the knot closed, the light would be gone, and there would only be the fury.
Sanguinius felt the imperative of decision. He made his choice. He refused the blackness and chose hope. He lunged towards the light. He raised his sword and plunged into the vision. He became the Sanguinius who slew Horus. The sword killed Horus, and it cut through his evil dream. It sliced through the knot. The visions fractured, mirrors broken into shards. They fell away into the void.
Now Sanguinius was falling again, but he was not done with the sword. After driving the Blade Encarmine through Horus’ skull and through the knot of fate, he brought it down. There was so much strength in the blow, it cut through unreality itself.
The blade sank into the flesh of the dream void. It tore the warp fabric open with fire. Light appeared beneath Sanguinius as he fell. He was leaving the realm of visions, but had not yet returned to reality. He was in a nether zone, neither dream nor real, but linked to both states. The light was another knot, another nexus. It looked like the intersection of the manufactorum conduits, only the conduits themselves were absent. It was the flow of warp energy and material mined from the interior of Pyrrhan, the unreal colliding with the solid to form the gate. Searing, impossible creation whirled through the convulsions of the nexus. It was the forge of the new reality of the galaxy. Sanguinius descended, wings outspread, to cleave the knot in two.
He passed through the nexus. In his wake, creation ended. The energy screamed. The uncontrollable explosion spread though the void. A dome of conflagration unfurled above Sanguinius.
Still he fell, still powered by the single sword blow. Another knot of energy appeared, and he cut it, and then the next, and the next, and the next. He had chosen to live, and so had torn destiny open, and with that rupture was slicing apart all the coils with which Chaos sought to entangle him. He was dealing a death blow to a creature he barely understood, whose size he could not grasp, and yet had defeated.
Down, down, down, the great sword blow of hope cutting through all the knots of ruin, a streak of red unleashing the flames of purification, until he cut his way back to reality. The void peeled back. The light of deliverance engulfed him. It blinded him with the blood-red fire. He blinked, and the flare vanished. He stood in the chamber from which he had first fallen. The daemon was at his feet. Its body was cut in two. As was its book and its staff. Weapons and corpse curled at the edges, dissolving from the materium. Violent light filled the chamber. A sea of liquid fire roiled across the ceiling. Currents of flame strove against each other. Maelstroms formed, melting everything above. Metal and stone dropped in blinding streams to the floor of the chamber. Everything was shaking, cracking, breaking apart.
‘Lord Sanguinius?’ Azkaellon was at his side, half reaching as if unsure whether or not the Angel was an illusion.
Sanguinius looked around, trying to get his bearings. He felt the solidity of the floor beneath his boots. The surface quaked, but did not flow away into dream. He looked at his sons. The Blood Angels were more or less as he had last seen them. More of the company had entered the chamber, but that was the only change in their disposition he could see. They were solid, unwavering in their reality. ‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘You vanished,’ said Azkaellon, alarmed.
On the Red Tear, he had fought visions, but they had been visions. He had not fallen into an elsewhere. The fusion of dreams and reality made him dizzy. ‘How long was I gone?’
‘A few seconds. You and the daemon.’
It had felt like hours. A lifetime. As long as death.
His vox-bead vibrated, erupting with the reports and interrogatives of his captains and Chapter Masters. He listened to them now, putting together what had happened during his absence. He realised after a few moments that he was the author of the new situation in the forge. What he had cut apart in that netherzone was now destroyed in reality. Tangles of conduits all over the manufactorum had exploded, far more than had been targeted. The complex trembled. Its song was broken beyond repair. The manufactorum screamed now. It howled a chorus of final pain and terror. Machines and power were tearing each other apart.
In the hail of reports coming over the vox, a fragment broke through. It was a single word. ‘Brother.’ The rest was lost in static. But the voice was Guilliman’s. The Blood Angels were no longer isolated from the other two Legions.
The tremors were growing more violent by the second. The for
ge’s scream rose higher, losing coherence, becoming a thunder of catastrophe.
‘We have triumphed!’ Sanguinius voxed to the Legion. ‘The enemy’s works fall before us.’
At his nod, Azkaellon ordered, ‘All forces, withdraw immediately.’
Spear held high, he led the turn away from the chamber. The tunnel beyond roared. Liquid flame consumed its ceiling too. The conduits split, bleeding energy. Uncanny lightning forked across the width of the corridor. It burned glowing crevasses into the walls and floor.
The Blood Angels raced to keep their victory. The mountainous forge was about to fall in on itself.
We do not die here, Sanguinius thought. My end is not yet.
And then he wondered, Are you sure?
He wasn’t. And the uncertainty elated him.
When the Blood Angels entered the manufactorum, they dropped into silence so complete, they might have been swallowed by the grave. Daemons abandoned the other manufactoria to flood the land. Under the shadow of the daemonic fortress, on a battlefield so long that the combatants at either end were over the horizon from each other, the Legions struggled against the abominations.
The Lion led his legionaries to the regions before the closed doors of the forge. The formations of Dark Angels were walls of black iron. The daemons hurled themselves against the barriers. The Dark Angels refused to give up a single step of the land they held. Their heavy artillery bombarded the swarms of monsters, and the infantry advanced methodically, the walls of iron crushing the enemy.
While the Warhawks of the IX Legion launched strafing runs against the manufactoria, cutting into the hordes as they emerged from the gaping doorways, and Khalybus led his Iron Hands against the daemons emerging from the foundry closest to the primary manufactorum, Guilliman struck from three centres. After being part of the vanguard in the initial run to the great forge, the Destroyers turned back, driving a wedge through the centre of the mass of daemons at the same time as Guilliman took Flame of Illyrium and the Invictus Bodyguard in a stiletto-jab through the body of daemons besieging the Dark Angels. Towards the middle of the battlefield and at the southern end, the greater body of the Ultramarines attacked in two radiating movements. Phalanxes cut into the enemy like so many swords. Guilliman forced the daemons to contend with multiple fronts and kept them on the defensive. They sought to repel the invaders and take back the land. The Ultramarines had no positions to hold. All they needed to do was keep moving, and destroy everything in their paths.
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