'And so, as the War Hounds became World Eaters, many of your veteran companies adorned their helms in this fashion. We wanted you to know that we mourned with you, and that every battle we fought at your side would be to the death.'
'Not for you!' he growls. 'The mantle is not for you!'
'Then you remember enough to know that it did not end well, sire? We tried to learn of your past, and you killed us for it. We tried to celebrate the breaking of chains, and you killed us for it. We tried to teach you how the Imperium wages war, and instead you hammered the Butcher's Nails into our skulls so that we would eventually kill one another, and spare you the effort.'
Without warning, Angron lets out a roar of inhuman hatred and rage, a roar loud enough to rattle my armour plates, and sweeps the great blade around in a flashing arc. His throne of skulls, the throne we built at his command, is obliterated in a single heartsbeat.
Chipped teeth and fragments of bone rain down.
I keep my eyes closed for as long as I dare - and that can only be a second or two. The daemon is breathing hard, less than a metre from my face. When he speaks, I can see the sharp, iron fangs glinting in his maw.
'If you wish to prove yourself to me, Kharn of the Legion, then you must follow this path to its end. We were all born to bleed, but the gods' favour is not given easily, or quickly. You must pay for it with blood and skulls. Blood enough to drown the stars, and skulls beyond number. The crusader will tell you as much.'
'You mean Lord Aurelian?'
Angron does not appear to recognise the name.
I exhale slowly. 'As we feared they would, sire, the Word Bearers have left us. Our fleet now stands alone, deep within Ultima Segmentum.'
'Then why do you keep me here? Why do you keep me in the dark?'
'This is your flagship, sire. Your place is with us. We spill blood together, so that you may remain.'
He shudders, screwing his eyes shut and letting out a vile sound that could almost be a whimper. 'No. No. The Legion is not mine, not any more. The Blood God calls to me. He is calling me to his side, to… to…'
'Sire, l assure you, we are free to—'
'No!' he shrieks. 'Reality itself drags against these imperfect limbs! My strength is failing! I should be so much more, but you… you will not let…'
The primarch begins to claw at his own face.
'This is not freedom! It is slavery!'
I fall to my knees. It wounds my soul to see him suffer like this, and to know that we keep him here for our own selfish reasons. It is far more than slaughter for slaughter's sake. For our sins, we have shackled Angron to the material realm, as Lorgar urged us.
We simply do not wish to lose our father again.
I do not wish to lose him.
But, if this loss of self is the price of immortality, then neither do I wish to follow in his footsteps. I do not wish to lose him, but I will not lose myself.
The daemon prince rises to his full height, opening those leathery wings so wide that they almost touch the pillars on each side of the hall. The deck beneath his cloven hooves begins to shudder as otherworldly energies roil about us. He roars again, bringing dust from the arches above.
'I will have blood! Blood! Blood for the Blood God! Blood for my lord Khorne!'
The runes upon his blade pulse in time with his black heart, picking out the harshest angles of his hell-forged armour plate, and I wait for him to strike my head from my unworthy shoulders.
* * *
It was more than an hour before Kharn returned to the bridge. He was carrying his battle helm loosely in one hand, the bristles of the centurion crest splayed and unkempt.
Lotara brushed her fingers back and forth inside her uniform collar. The skin on her neck felt raw.
'I didn't know if you'd be coming back this time,' she muttered. 'That was a bad quake. We've lost power to life support along the upper portside flank. I've ordered a hard seal of the embarkation decks as a precaution.'
The legionary regarded her for a moment as he passed. 'You shaved your head.'
She shrugged, and stepped up to the command dais, sheathing her combat knife.
'I did. It's always too damned hot in here.'
The smile that twisted his features was cruel, but short-lived; Kharn winced as a thin trickle of blood ran from the staple beneath his eye. It looked almost like a red tear.
'Where is Vel-Kheredar?' he demanded, wiping it away.
'Overseeing the repairs.'
'Summon him, Lotara. I have need of his talents.'
The flag-captain sighed, and took her place on the throne. From where she sat, Kharn appeared silhouetted against the flickering oculus. His attention was fixed upon the stained deck plates.
'Admiring your handiwork?' she said, with a sharp click of her tongue. 'Feel free to take a brush to it yourself, if you like. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that blood is basically impossible to clean up without water.'
He didn't answer.
She rubbed imaginary grime from between the brass keys on her armrest pad. 'So… has Lord Angron issued us with any new orders? Do we have a specified target?'
Kharn shook his head.
'In that case, my lord - what are your orders?'
He trudged back to his customary position just to the left of the dais, and carefully set down his helmet.
'Have Master Tevu confer with his fellow Navigators across the fleet,' he replied, 'and plot a course for the nearest occupied system. If we wish our primarch to endure long enough to reach the Throneworld, then we must make sacrifice.'
The World Eaters fleet tore through the void, with the Conqueror at its head. The flagship trailed several of her damaged Ursus Claws, the great magnetic harpoons clattering against the scarred hull as she powered on in haste, heedless of any wider strategy than the immediate pursuit of bloodshed.
The bitterly cold world of Tekeli was the first that they encountered. Home to one of the great donjon-complexes raised by Rogal Dorn at the height of the Crusade, it had been intended as a bastion from which future generations might govern the considerable populace of the Ruthan Marches. In those more innocent times, notions of galactic Unity and the Imperial Truth had genuinely prevailed, and even the XII Legion had grudgingly agreed that a day might come when they could lay down their weapons for good.
Of course it was not to be.
There was no orbital bombardment no countenance of a void war. The World Eaters simply hurled themselves at the planet, desperate to feel solid ground beneath their feet and a weapon in each hand. The sky blackened beneath the sheer, overwhelming weight of the drop assault, from the high mountain passes to the frozen seas, and the defenders knew that they had already lost.
A maniple of engines from the Legio Thanataris - the only Titanicus element within the sector - had taken command of the local garrison. Deploying to the lowlands beyond the donjon with their Secutarii ground forces arrayed in earthworks upon the flanks, they would make the traitors pay dearly for every metre of ground.
But when the first waves of traitor drop pods came down within the civilian centres to the northwest, the princeps realised they had wholly misjudged the World Eaters' intentions.
The Legion had not come to crush the bastion, but to slaughter every last man, woman and child on Tekeli.
It went on for days. While the vox-net lasted, the open channels became a cacophony of agonised screams, offers of surrender and pleas for mercy, before finally dissolving into little more than fitful static.
On the eighth day, when the last of the Titans fell, a grim shadow finally spread its wings over the tallest ramparts of the donjon, and crimson lightning split the clouds overhead.
Wreathed in the smoke of a hundred corpse pyres, the daemon Angron raised his black blade to the heavens, and bellowed in unholy triumph as his blood-crazed warriors broke through the gates.
Vel-Kheredar knows me well, it seems.
The archmagos reforged Gorechild. Now he has reforged me.
22.
I will wear the red, the brass, the bronze, fresh from the armoury and turned by my own hand, though I am no Devourer. I spit on Tarugar and all the rest. Our primarch is a newborn creature of the warp, a prince of blood. He needs no protection that legionaries can offer.
Rather, I am sanctified in the colours that are said to most please our new god.
But I will not lose myself.
23.
Many of my brothers have followed my example, even as they follow me now on the field of war. The brain-fire keeps our blood hot. With every swing of our blades, we anoint the icy ground before us.
24. 25.
We will walk the Eightfold Path.
We will wear the mantle of the caedere remissum, even though the primarch forbade it.
We will rebel, just as he rebelled.
We will kill not because we are ordered to, but because we live for it. Blood, and pain, and nothing more.
26.
This last addition is the purest form of worship I can imagine, glowing bright and crimson in the corner of my visor display. It is a calming counterpoint to the Nails' fierce tick, tick, tick…
Vel-Kheredar knows me well indeed.
27.
A tally. A measure of my skill, and a tether for my soul.
The others may do as they wish, but I will not lose myself.
28.
I will not become like our primarch.
29.
30. 31.
This is no brotherly contest of old. These are my offerings to the Blood God. By the count of their skulls will I prove my worth, for they are all I have to offer in place of my own, before each new battle's ending.
Tekeli. Horgan Prime. Dabrosc, and all three of its moons. Stenyr. The orbital cities over Parliax. Another world, whose name I forget. Nebe VI. Nebe II. Deluge.
And on, and on, to the hallowed Throneworld itself.
32. 33. 34. 35.
My father's name is Angron. That is all that he has left.
We have only Lorgar to thank for that.
And one day, we will.
Names had power.
Any novitiate of the Thousand Sons could tell you that.
To know something's name was to understand it, to have a window into the very heart of its being and see the workings of the machinery that underpinned it.
To pick the lock on a soul, you needed its name.
A name told you everything. The conventions of a name told you of the people who coined it. Etymological roots spoke to the historical circumstances of its origin, and each linguistic change that mutated it along the way told a unique story.
Names were everything.
Which was why Vistario's ignorance of this world's name so vexed him. The star chart Murshid had empathically drawn from the stagnant waters of the orrery retained no record of it, and the caustic winds blowing over the planet's irradiated plains only muttered the same imprecation that had drawn them to this barren rock in the first place.
'I can still hear it,' said Akhtar, a dusty gauntlet pressed to the faded Raptora icon at the side of his helmet.
'We all hear it,' snapped Murshid. Murshid was Athanaean; he heard the planet's lament most keenly.
He'd once likened walking the surface of dead worlds to stepping into a stream of liqnite and feeling the aching cold slowly seeping up through his flesh until his entire body was rigid. The gifts of the Great Ocean were manifold, but so too were their burdens.
Vistario's fellowship had been Corvidae, back when the idea of fellowship had meant something. He'd learned his craft under the tutelage of Magistus Amon in his clockwork pyramid of brass, honing his ability to unweave the myriad threads of potential futures. His instincts for the truth of what might be were strong, but in the centuries since the retreat from Terra, the Corvidae had waned, now a shadow of its former glory.
The Great Ocean - always a treacherous mistress - had become a raging virago of psychic fury, the last breath of the Warmaster still echoing, centuries after his fall.
Yet even the mightiest oceans know ebbs and flows, and sometimes the veil obscuring the future would part, allowing brief glimpses into the endless, branching possibilities of the future.
One such glance had lodged in Vistario's mind like a knapped shard of flint. A gleaming, reflective blade in which he saw this dead and nameless world, a hollow city and a plaintive message from a time already layered with mythic allegory, like a sunken wreck overtaken by the encrustation of deep-water denizens.
Vistario had dismissed the vision as meaningless, casting it from his mind to fly on the aether-winds of the Planet of the Sorcerers.
Just another fragment of unknown prophecy.
Useless.
Or so he had thought until the Crimson King appeared within his crystalline tower, ablaze with psychic might: a terrifying monster of ego and fury.
'Go,' Magnus commanded. 'Heed this message. Find the messenger.'
Heed this message.
Find the messenger.
Two simple orders, yet to obey the primarch's command was almost impossible. Following a fragmentary vision without context was like chasing a whisper of thought in an angry mob, a hundred echoes spreading from the source, each amplifying exponentially and mutating until all trace of the original was obscured.
The three of them had left the Planet of the Sorcerers aboard the Clavis Aurea, a vessel so transformed by that world's chaotic nature as to be unrecognisable even to its original shipwrights.
Guided by Murshid's psychic map, Akhtar steered them through the roiling vastness of the Great Ocean with a seer stone torn from the ruins of the Reflecting Caves.
High in the Navigator's compartment, Vistario journeyed in the third enumeration, clinging to the gossamer-thin memory of his discarded vision. He replayed it over and over in his mind in search of some hitherto unseen clue as to its source, some echo that might point him towards greater understanding.
Vistario had lost track of how long they had searched.
Years, most likely, but who could know in a realm where time was the first of the universal 'constants' to be brushed aside?
He had despaired of ever seeing the vision again. Their quest was as futile as reading a message in a bottle washed upon the shores, writing a reply and casting it back into the waters in hope the original sender would read it.
But Magnus the Red had issued his command, and to fail in any task, even an impossible task, was to invite terrible retribution.
Better to stay away than return empty-handed.
Then, with hope all but lost… a miracle. The mob parted, the whisper became a shout and its source was revealed. A simple phrase: ambiguous, yet portentous.
The Ancient awaits.
Little remained of the city's soaring majesty, though Vistario imagined it had once been beautiful.
Its destroyers had been thorough. The ground still bore the scars of an orbital bombardment so ferocious it had pounded an entire substrate of the surface to ash and vitrified rock. Walking at ground level was like traversing a plateau of volcanic glass, and its outline had only been possible to discern from the air.
Vistario mag-locked his bolter to his thigh and bent to lift a delicate shard of wafer-thin glass shaped like the head of a spear. He turned it over in his hands, the lens of his helmet staring back at him from its reflective depths.
In the space of a breath the image changed.
Vistario dropped the shard and it shattered, breaking into an unnatural arrangement of pieces. He saw significance in the pattern, but a sudden wind scattered the pieces before he could divine its meaning.
'What did you see?' asked Murshid, bringing his bolter to his shoulder as he read the sudden change in Vistario's aura.
'I do not know,' he replied. 'It was a fleeting glimpse only.'
'Of what?' said Akhtar, traversing his weapon over the ruins.
'A host of accusing eyes, as if reflected in a broken mirror.'
&
nbsp; 'A vision of the future or an echo of the past?' asked Murshid.
'You know better than to ask that,' said Vistario.
They pressed on, moving towards what he knew with a certainty he could not explain was the heart of the city. The rubble here was thicker, more deeply stacked - perhaps a king's palace or some other grand civic structure.
'Here,' said Murshid, pausing by a heap of fallen granite blocks of polished pink, each with the suggestion of swirling carvings upon its outward face. 'These were once part of a greater whole.'
'Weren't we all?' muttered Akhtar.
'Have a caution,' said Vistario. 'All whispers eventually return to the Planet of the Sorcerers. Did Ulthar's fate teach you nothing?'
That silenced them all, the fate of the Athanaean splinter cult all too keen in their recollections.
'Can you rebuild it?' asked Murshid, turning his attention back to the blocks.
'Easily,' said Akhtar, eager to employ his powers. He rose into the seventh enumeration to lift the blocks, turning them over with brute psychic force and twisting them upon their axes until they slotted together like a three-dimensional puzzle.
The remnant of an archway was formed, seven metres tall and three wide, with knotwork carvings etched upon each cyclopean stone.
Vistario approached the towering arch and paused to examine the carvings. 'They resemble musical notes.'
'That is exactly what they are,' said Murshid, his head tilted to the side as he followed their course with a finger in the air, like an orchestral conductor. 'Every block is a song within a greater work, a choral symphony rendered in stone and sung by those who trod its byways.'
A series of jumbled impressions passed through Vistario's mind at Murshid's words. Of singers and war, of fire from the heavens: the final cacophony, the closing curtain of a drama…
'No, not the closing curtain,' he whispered. 'The opening act…'
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