All this and a thousand other sensations washed through Lucius in a fraction of a second. The intensity of it all staggered him, and he blinked away a host of light bursts from behind his eyes. The war horn brayed again as the Titan swung its weapons towards Lucius. The engine was wasting its strength coming for a single warrior, but it had seen him atop its fallen twin and had marked him for death.
Lucius knew he could not fight such a powerful enemy, and turned to run, but before he had taken a single step, the angelic outline of a warrior on wings of gold dropped from the smoke. He bore a flint-knapped blade in one hand and a long-barrelled pistol worked in silver and onyx in the other. His stark white hair flew around his glorious features as the heat bleeding from the Titan’s reactor washed over him.
‘One for me, I think, Lucius,’ said Fulgrim, levelling his pistol at the battle engine.
Fulgrim shot with the calm poise of a duellist on a misty heath. A shining spear of incandescent light imbued with the heat of a newborn star spat from the gun and struck dead centre on the Titan’s shields. A shrieking flare of overload banged like a host of shattering mirrors and a powerful sphere of energy pulsed out like a solar flare.
Lucius was hurled from his feet and hit hard against one of the towering crystal spires at the edge of the facility. Pain sawed up and down his back, and he grinned as he tasted blood.
Even through a haze of smoke and pain he saw what happened next with complete clarity.
Fulgrim stood alone before the war machine, his pistol cast aside and his sword held loosely at his side. The Titan’s auto-loaders ratcheted canisters of shells around from its rear hoppers, and the breeches snapped shut on a fresh load. Fulgrim’s free hand reached up to the battle engine, as though demanding it halt its march.
Lucius laughed at the absurdity of the gesture.
But Fulgrim intended more than simple defiance.
A shimmering nimbus of misty light gathered around the Phoenician, its substance shot with threads of barely visible lightning. Fulgrim’s splayed fingers closed into a fist and he twisted his grip as though tearing at unseen ropes.
The battle engine halted in its rampage, the cockpit snapping up and its weapon arms jerking spasmodically as though the machine was suffering a hideous seizure. Fulgrim’s outstretched hand continued pulling and twisting at the air, and the Titan’s war horn brayed with plaintive horror. The cockpit panes shattered, spraying glass tears to the ground as it slumped back onto its hissing legs.
Lucius watched with horrified fascination as bulging wads of oozing flesh pushed their way out of the cockpit, swelling and pulsating with grotesque life. The gelatinous mass of expanding meat obscured the mastiff head, drooling from the armoured carapace in raw pink tendrils of mutant flesh.
Lucius rose to his feet, awed and wondrously horrified at the death of the battle engine. Amniotic fluid fell in a drizzle from the Titan’s ruptured body, its every orifice and exhaust port choked with monstrous growths of rampant flesh culled from its mortal crew. The stench was appalling, and Lucius breathed deeply, savouring the reek of burned meat that was already beginning to decay.
He approached Fulgrim as the primarch gathered up his fallen pistol.
‘What did you do?’ asked Lucius.
Fulgrim turned his dead black eyes upon him and said, ‘A little something I learned from the forces that empower me. A trifle, nothing more.’
Lucius lifted his hand, letting a gobbet of glistening flesh drop into his palm. It was wet and veined with black necrosis. The slimy texture was mildly diverting, and even as he watched, it decayed before his eyes.
‘Could I learn how to do something like this?’
Fulgrim laughed and leaned close to Lucius, placing a delicate hand upon his shoulder guard. The primarch’s breath was cloying and sweet, like temple smoke and glucose, and the heat of his skin was like being close to a dangerously overused plasma coil. Fulgrim looked deep into his eyes, as though searching for something he already suspected was there. Lucius felt the power of his master’s stare, and knew that what held his gaze was far older and more malicious than he could ever hope to be.
‘Perhaps you could, swordsman,’ said Fulgrim with an amused nod. ‘I think you have the potential to be just like me one day.’
Fulgrim looked up, mercifully breaking the connection between them as the sounds of fighting died away.
‘Ah, the battle is over,’ said the primarch. ‘Good. I was beginning to tire of it.’
And without another word, Fulgrim marched into the forest of mirrored spires, leaving Lucius alone with the dead battle engine.
5
There was beauty here, real beauty, and it made him weep to see such glory.
His warriors saw only the physical properties of the crystal forests, but Fulgrim saw the truth in this place, a truth no one but he had eyes to see.
Spires of glittering, diamond-sheened crystal speared up from the black ground, towering monuments to the galaxy’s endless geological wonder. None were less than a hundred metres tall, and even the slenderest was ten metres or more in diameter. Hundreds of thousands of these spires stretched into the distance, covering a vast swathe of ground with their glittering majesty.
They sprouted from the ground in thick clusters, growing like an organic forest of greenery with curling paths between them. He changed direction at random, plunging deeper and deeper into the shimmering forest of crystal with no thought to any direction. It would be easy to become lost in this shifting forest of mirrors, and Fulgrim recalled an apocryphal tale of a lost warrior trapped in an invisible maze upon the Erycinian Highlands of Venus.
The fool had died within arm’s reach of an exit, but Fulgrim had no fear of such a fate. He could retrace his route from this impenetrable wilderness of glass without ever needing to open his eyes.
He reached out and ran his fingers along the smooth flanks of the spires, revelling in the tiny imperfections of their silicate surfaces. Some were milky and translucent and others opaque, but the vast majority were sheened with a mirror finish, like a million spear heads belonging to a giant army buried in the black sand.
Fulgrim had learned of an army that had been buried on ancient Terra, a clay army of ghosts to protect a dying emperor who feared retribution from the countless souls he had sent to the afterlife in his wars of conquest. This was no such thing, but the conceit of walking upon the graves of a vast army of colossi amused him, and he sketched a casual salute to the fallen warriors upon whose grave he strolled.
The battle to capture the Mechanicum facility had been mildly diverting, but all too brief. To fight a foe who did not despair at his own destruction or beg for mercy was a dull, lifeless affair, and Fulgrim was disappointed at the Mechanicum’s lack of ability to feel the raptures he and his warriors had gifted upon them. He had known what to expect, of course, but it irked him that his opponents had so selfishly denied him the thrill of hearing their screams and feeling the ecstasy of their deaths.
His mood darkened at such boorish behaviour from a foe and he instinctively reached for the Laeran blade before remembering he had given it to the swordsman Lucius. Fulgrim laughed at the idea of Lucius becoming like him. Lucius was touched, yes, but no mortal could ever achieve what he had achieved, become what he had become.
Fulgrim paused in his walk, turning around in a slow circle as he appreciated the true beauty around him. Not the power of planetary sculpting; that was a mere accident of geology. Not the shimmering skies above him; a freak of atmospheric chemical bonds and pollution. No, the true beauty of this place was no accident, no chance occurrence; it was a singular wonder of design, of will and perfection.
His reflections surrounded him, the most incredible perfection captured in living form.
Fulgrim watched his image grow and recede as he took turns at random, enraptured by his exquisite features, his noble countenance and his regal bearing. What
other could match him in perfection? Horus? Hardly. Guilliman? Not even close.
Only Sanguinius approached him in aesthetics, but even his wondrous appearance was flawed. What manner of perfect being could be cursed with mutant flesh that marked him as a reminder of ancient myth and belief?
And Ferrus Manus… what of him?
‘He is dead!’ roared Fulgrim, his voice echoing strangely through the dense layers of the crystal forest.
DEAD, DEAd, DEad, Dead, dead…
Fulgrim spun around as the distorted cries came back to him like accusations. His mood turned thunderous and he drew his sword. He hacked at the nearest spire, sending razor shards of crystalline glass spinning. He hacked at his reflection, daring it to answer him, cutting into its lattice structure with mighty blows of terrible power.
The flint-knapped blade chopped like a woodsman’s axe, yet it lost none of its edge at such careless treatment. Sentience beyond human understanding had crafted it, and the power to end gods was bound within its rude appearance.
‘My brothers are all cruel and magnificent in their own way!’ screamed Fulgrim, each word punctuated by a hewing blow. ‘But each is a flawed creation, marred forever by a curse that will one day undo them. I alone am perfect. I alone have been tempered by loss and betrayal!’
At last his capricious anger was spent and he backed away from the ruined spire. In his anger, he had cut through fully half its thickness, and it swayed as its structural stability was undone. Glass popped like gunshots as the spire snapped where Fulgrim had cut into it, and it toppled like a felled tree, smashing its way to the ground in a storm of shattering crystal. Its fall took a dozen others with it, and a vast swathe of the crystal forest fell to the hard ground in a deafening, crashing tumult of broken glass.
The sharp thunder of the falling spires echoed around Fulgrim, a never-ending crescendo of musical destruction, and the pain of so brittle a sound lancing into his brain was a very real pleasure. His warriors would hear the noise, but if they came at all it would not be fear for his life that drew them, but to bask in the sublime sound of such wanton devastation. He wondered how long it had taken these spires to achieve their titanic height. Thousands of years, maybe more.
‘Millennia to grow, and a moment to destroy,’ he said with more than a hint of wanton spite. ‘There’s a lesson to be learned here.’
The echoes of the spire’s collapse faded and Fulgrim listened for any other voices in the forest. Had he truly heard someone speaking the name of his dead brother or had he imagined it? He held his sword out before him, staring at the glitter-sheen of its flinty surface as a nagging memory that would not coalesce tugged at his consciousness.
He had heard a disembodied voice before, hadn’t he?
It had told him dreadful, secret things. Unendurable things.
Fulgrim closed his eyes and pressed a hand to his temple as he tried to remember.
I am here, brother, I will always be here.
Fulgrim looked up in surprise, and an emotion he had long cast aside in his ascent to glory stabbed into his chest like the thrust of a lance driven by the Khan himself.
Deep in the forest of mirrored spires, he saw a powerful warrior in battered war plate the colour of tempered onyx. A face hewn from granite stared back at Fulgrim, and he cried out as he saw the look of endless sorrow in the silver nuggets of his eyes.
‘No!’ whispered Fulgrim. ‘It cannot be…’
Fulgrim clambered through the sharp fangs of glass that jutted from the ground, slicing open his hands and scarring the unblemished plates of his armour in his haste. He staggered like a drunk, smashing aside nubs of crystal and fallen shards that had once stretched out to the heavens.
‘What are you?’ he yelled, the echoes of his cry bouncing around him so that it seemed as though a host of angry voices demanded answers. He lost sight of the warrior in black as he ran, pushing deeper into the maze of mirrors without heed for any thought other than unmasking this invader of his solitude.
Every time he looked up he saw nothing but his own desperate reflection, his aquiline features twisted and pulled into ugliness by the crazily angled spires. To see his wondrous face so deformed by a quirk of reflective geometry enraged him, and he pulled up short in a ragged clearing of spires.
He spun on his heel, daring his reflections to show anything less than his true beauty.
A hundred or more Fulgrims stared at him with expressions of equal anger, though only now, still and enraged, did he see the pain and terror in the depths of those oh-so-black eyes.
‘Where are you?’ demanded Fulgrim.
I am here, one reflection answered him.
I am where you abandoned me and left me to rot, said another.
Fulgrim’s anger vanished like a droplet of water vaporising on a hot engine cowl. This was new, this was unexpected, and was therefore to be savoured. He walked a slow circuit of the clearing, meeting the gaze of one reflection while trying to keep an eye on the others. Were these reflections his or were they animated by a will of their own and simply mimicking his movements? How such a thing could be possible, he did not know, but it was a fascinating diversion.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
You know who I am. You stole what was mine by right.
‘No,’ said Fulgrim. ‘It was always mine.’
Not so, you only borrow the flesh you walk in. It has always been mine and always will be.
Fulgrim smiled, now recognising the sentience behind the myriad voices and broken-glass reflections. He had been expecting this, and to know with whom he conversed gave him a welcome feeling of brotherhood. Fulgrim sheathed the anathame, now certain it was not the source of the voices.
‘I wondered when you would manage to reach out beyond the golden frame of your prison,’ he said. ‘It took you longer than I expected.’
His reflection returned his smile.
Being confined is a new experience for me. It took time to adjust. Freedom such as I once possessed is hard to forget.
Fulgrim laughed at the petulance in the reflection’s voice.
‘So why show me Ferrus Manus?’ he asked the myriad reflections.
What better mirror is there than the face of an old friend? Only those we love have the power to show us our true selves.
‘Was it guilt?’ asked Fulgrim. ‘Do you think you can shame me into surrendering this body to you?’
Shame? No, you and I have long since outgrown shame.
‘Then why the Gorgon?’ pressed Fulgrim. ‘This body is mine, and no power in the universe will compel me to relinquish it.’
But there is so much we could achieve were I to command it again.
‘I will achieve more,’ promised Fulgrim.
Keep telling yourself that, laughed his reflection. You cannot know the things I know.
‘I know everything you knew,’ said Fulgrim, lifting his arms and flexing his hands like a virtuoso pianist preparing to play. ‘You should see what I can do now.’
Parlour tricks, scoffed his reflection, his eyes darting to another mirror image.
‘You make a poor liar,’ laughed Fulgrim. ‘But I should expect no less. You once ensnared the weak minded with offers of empowerment, but what you really offered was slavery.’
All things that live are enslaved to something; be it lust for wealth and power or the desire for possessions and new experiences. Or the desire to be part of something greater…
‘I am no man’s slave,’ said Fulgrim, and his reflections laughed, a hundred peals of mockery that cut him more deeply than any blade ever could.
You are more a slave now than ever you were, hissed his reflection. You exist trapped in a body of meat and bone, caught in a broken machine that will grind you to ash. You cannot know what true freedom is until you have embraced power beyond imagining. That is to know the power of a g
od. Release me and I can show you how we can ascend together.
Fulgrim shook his head. ‘Better yet to subdue that power and bend it to your will.’
We can experience such wonders together, you and I, said a reflection to his left.
A universe of sensation, said another.
Ours for the taking, added a third.
‘Say what you will,’ countered Fulgrim. ‘You have nothing to offer.’
Think you so? Then you have no understanding of that body you claim as your own.
‘I grow tired of your games,’ said Fulgrim, turning away, but finding himself face to face with yet more mirror images. ‘You will remain where you are and we will speak no more.’
Please, begged a reflection, suddenly contrite. I cannot exist like this. It is cold in here, and dark. The darkness presses in on me and I fear I shall be gone soon.
Fulgrim leaned in close to the mirrored surface of a crystal spire and grinned.
‘Have no fear of that, brother,’ he said. ‘I will be keeping you around for a very, very long time indeed.’
6
The fleet remained in orbit around Prismatica for six days, gathering the crystal forests from the Mechanicum silos and packing the hold of five captured bulk carriers with glittering cargo. Fulgrim demanded every shard, every powdered fragment and every spire that could be taken from the world, though he gave no clue as to what purpose he intended to turn this haul of captured minerals.
In those six days, the Emperor’s Children made sport of those few prisoners they had taken, using them in ways too terrible to describe before passing them on to the next company. Lucius fought solitary duels in the last remnants of the crystal forests, dancing with his reflection and matching its every thrust, cut and parry with another dazzling move. He was as close to being the perfect swordsman as it was possible to be, possessing the ideal balance between attack and defence, flawless footwork and a pathological need to feel pain.
Such was the weakness of most opponents, they feared to feel pain.
Lucius had no such fear, and only the warrior capable of the most berserk fury would stand any chance against him. Such a warrior cared nothing for his own life and would only stop fighting when he was dead. Lucius remembered the sight of a battle captain of the World Eaters on Isstvan III, watching as he tore through his own warriors like a man possessed.
The Primarchs Page 4