by Various
‘Because I need your help,’ he said. ‘We cannot do this without you. We have learned much, but we are blind men searching for revelation in all the wrong places.’
‘So you wish my blessing and my help? Well, I do not give it. You are walking a dangerous path, my son. Trust me, I know the nobility that drives you, I felt it myself. But you would think that you had broken the curse of the flesh change only to be deceived by the very power you believed had brought you success.’
‘But surely, together, we could finally find an answer?’
Magnus shook his head. ‘No, I cannot help you. Moreover, I will not help you. And you are to cease all efforts in this matter. Do you understand?’
Ahriman felt his control of the Enumerations slipping as he rose into a higher, combative stance. ‘No, I do not.’
Without seeming to move, Magnus swelled to become a towering giant, a feral beast of blood-matted fur with hardened skin. His single eye became a molten sun that pinned Ahriman in place, a carcass set for the spit.
‘Your little cabal is no more,’ he boomed. ‘“And woe betide he who ignores my warning or breaks faith with me. He shall be my enemy, and I will visit such destruction upon him and all his followers that, from now until the end of all things, he shall rue the day he turned from my light”.’
Ahriman recognised the words and the bitterness that dripped from every syllable. Only one question remained to be asked.
‘Why?’
The awful threat and terrible danger faded from Magnus’s eye as his physique returned to its former stature. ‘Because matters of greater import occupy my thoughts.’
‘Matters greater than your Legion’s end?’ Ahriman demanded.
Magnus did not answer, and cast his eye to the raging storms of light above him, as though the answer lay within them. His features softened and took on a thoughtful cast.
‘Much more important,’ he said at last.
‘Tell me. Tell me, that I might understand why you abandon us.’
Magnus nodded and reached out to place a bronze-skinned hand upon his shoulder.
The Planet of the Sorcerers fell away like a shining bauble dropped down a darkened well.
‘I will do better,’ the primarch said. ‘I will show you.’
Ahriman felt a terrible dislocation, like the wrench of a teleport, but a hundred times worse. His genhanced frame, bio-engineered to resist the extremes of any environment, was suddenly that of a frail mortal as his subtle body was ripped from his flesh.
His body of light soared through the Great Ocean, borne upon the back of a fiery golden comet, a presence of such power that he dared not look directly upon it. He knew that this was Magnus, but in the trackless wildernesses of the Great Ocean, it was no longer constrained by any constancy of form.
Stars and galaxies spiralled around him, an endless parade of random events that were not random at all. Everything proceeded to the design of fate’s architect, a pattern so grand it could only be glimpsed from beyond the farthest extremes of existence. Even then it was beyond Ahriman’s ability to comprehend, its complexities too subtle and its intrigues too tightly woven to be understood.
Sickness built in Ahriman’s belly, a bone-deep vertigo and a dizzying sense of falling. He struggled not to cry out. He was nothing to this universe, an insignificant grain amidst a desert of wind-scattered dust formed from the inconsequences of the galaxy.
He was not special. He was not anything.
‘No!’ he cried out in desperation. ‘I am Ahzek Ahriman!’
And with that thought he was whole again, a warrior-scholar of the Thousand Sons. He forced his mind into the second Enumeration, where bodily concerns were put aside in favour of the pursuit of enlightenment.
His body was gone, and in its place was a shimmer of light; a conglomeration of wheels turning within wheels, eyes by the million and a form as immaculate as it was unknown. This was the purest expression of his being, a creature of light and thought.
The voice of Magnus came to him through senses unknown, each word freighted with terrible foreknowledge. ‘Come, my son – we will be thieves of revelation. See what I see, and tell me I am wrong to think beyond your concerns.’
Suddenly, Ahriman did not want to look. Once he looked, nothing would ever be the same. But he could not refuse his primarch’s demand, and the comfort of ignorance was something to be shunned. His shining body flew close to the radiant form of Magnus.
‘Show me everything,’ he said.
‘Everything? No, not that. Never that. But I will show you enough.’
‘Enough for what?’
‘Enough to know that we still have a choice before us, one that will affect how we are remembered by the tides of history.’
The stars wheeled around them, streaking by in a blur.
They travelled at the speed of thought, and where thought willed them, they arrived in an instant. The sensation was spellbinding. Like gods they bestrode the galaxy, travelling its length and breadth with each moment.
Ahriman had just begun to appreciate the wonder of his primarch’s power, when he realised that they had stopped moving, the world resolving around him in the familiar patterns of stars and the elliptical orbits of planets.
‘Where are we?’ he asked.
‘This is Tsagualsa, the carrion-world of the Night Haunter. A place of murder and torment, where the screams of the dying are never-ending. A place from which my brother wages a campaign of genocide. It is from here that he was sent to fight the First Legion of the Lion.’
They spun through the system, past worlds dead and worlds ravaged by conflict, mayhem and the collateral damage of two Legions at war. Ahriman felt his gaze drawn towards the system’s edge, where a vicious battle raged in the void, two fleets battering at one another at close range. Intermingled warships engaged in broadside brawls, filling the space between them with high explosive ordnance and criss-crossing las-fire. Wrecks blazed from prow to stern and split apart as their keels broke under intense gravometric pressures.
Ahriman saw thousands of soul-lights flickering out of existence, lives lost by the hundreds every second.
‘This is the death rattle of the Thramas Crusade,’ said Magnus, grimly.
Ahriman spun around the battle, a ghost of light bearing witness to the cold, airless slaughter. The black ships bearing the winged sword were in the ascendance, reaping a dreadful tally among the midnight ships of the Night Lords, but it seemed the VIII Legion was not seeking a decisive engagement. Magnus went on.
‘For two years they have beaten themselves bloody against one another, but with this battle, the war is over and my brothers retire to lick their wounds.’
‘Who was the victor?’
‘That remains to be seen, though the Dark Angels still bear with them the seeds of their own destruction. In such times, can anyone be called the victor?’
The heavens blurred again, and this time Ahriman felt resistance to their passage.
One by one, the stars went out, snuffed like candles in a novitiates’ dormitory until all was darkness. Beyond the black curtain, Ahriman saw a burning world, cracked and ravaged by fire. Its continental plates had split apart, and an eightfold symbol was burned into its crust.
Beyond this was a planet wreathed in a glittering corona of battle, a red world bathed in blood and madness. Ahriman made to fly onwards, to see what new insanity was at play, but a gentle psychic pressure from Magnus halted him.
‘No, my son. To come any closer would see you tainted by the madness that would drag Sanguinius and his Angels to their doom.’
‘The Blood Angels, destroyed?’
‘Time will tell, for Sanguinius stands at a crossroads. He knows both paths end in blood, but he is stronger than anyone understands. Well… almost anyone. Guilliman knows, but even he does not truly know his brother’s wounded heart.’
The image of the blood-red planet faded, replaced by the vast gulfs of wilderness space between worlds – empt
iness that the human mind was incapable of grasping.
‘Why are you showing me this?’ asked Ahriman.
‘Because I will not be made a fool of, again,’ Magnus spat. ‘Prospero burns because I thought I knew more than anyone else. If we are to choose a course for our Legion, I would have it be the right one. And to that end, I travel the stars and time itself to find my brothers, to know with whom they stand.’
Ahriman felt the emptiness around him grow ever more claustrophobic, like the walls of a meditation chamber inexorably closing in. What had felt unimaginably huge and spacious a moment ago, now felt cramped and constricting.
‘That is the weight of our decision pressing in on us, Ahzek,’ the primarch said. ‘War has come to the galaxy – a war like never before, and soon I will have to choose a side.’
‘Why must you choose a side? We were betrayed by the Emperor, and Horus Lupercal has nothing to offer us.’
‘Think you so? Then let me show you Ultramar.’
The glittering form of Magnus flared brightly, dragging Ahriman in his wake as they plummeted through space once more. This time they travelled to a blue world that withered in the hell-storm of its doomed star. Its cities were flayed by radioactive winds, and those souls not yet below in the subterranean arcologies were already dead.
‘I know this world,’ said Ahriman, horrified at what he saw. ‘I came here after visiting the Crystal Library on Prandium. This is Calth.’
Ships of war scattered from the doomed planet, the gold and azure of the XIII Legion and the bruise-red of the XVII. The Ultramarines vessels regrouped, while the Word Bearers used the chaos of battle’s end to scatter into the darkness between the Five Hundred Worlds.
Even as Ahriman watched, a storm exploded from the planet’s surface, like the most terrible eruption on the surface of a star. Invisible to the naked eye, it was a vast outpouring of inchoate energies to those with a link to the aether. It engulfed Calth, and soon spread beyond its system boundaries, a ruinous storm of epic proportions that burned like a voracious forest fire.
Uncontrolled, raw and bleeding-edged, the storm tore through the immaterial realm without direction, a raging barrier of hatred and spite that was impassable to all but the most powerful individuals. The energies expended in its creation beggared belief, and Ahriman found it hard to comprehend that something so devastating could come about naturally. But who except the Thousand Sons had the power to summon anything like it?
‘They burned Calth…’ he murmured, incredulously. ‘For Monarchia?’
‘Monarchia? No, Calth was but a prologue. Lorgar’s vision is grander and wider than the death of a single world, and the cold logic of Guilliman’s “practical” is yet to play out in all its majesty and tragedy. Already the pieces are moving, and I sense that this will be the key to everything.’
Ahriman could scarcely believe it. ‘Lorgar dares to assault the Five Hundred Worlds? Has he gone mad? Guilliman’s armies are Legion. Lorgar could never defeat the host of Ultramar.’
Glittering amusement passed through the luminosity of Magnus’s form. ‘I will pass your sentiments to my brother when I see him next. After all, history teaches us that there is no such thing as an invincible army…’
He paused, seeming to consider that truth for a moment.
‘But sometimes, history needs a push.’
‘The Word of the Emperor must be Read and Heard with Diligence, so that you may arrive to the Knowledge that is needful for you.’
– from the The Lectitio Divinitatus
The sky above the city flashed and cracked with arcs of lightning, starkly silhouetting the army retreating from the shattered outskirts. Thousands of men and women pulled back from Milvian, bloodied and despondent. The burnt shells of tanks and transports were left in their wake as the soldiers of the Therion Cohort responded swiftly and gratefully to the retreat order.
Shellfire and las-blasts followed them, further thinning their numbers, until covering barrages from hundreds of emplaced guns fell upon Milvian, stalling any pursuit. In the growing gloom of twilight, the Therions streamed towards their waiting comrades.
The display view faded to static as the recon-link was cut by the observation officers accompanying the assault. Marcus was relieved that he did not have to look at the downcast columns trudging back to the Imperial lines; the view was replaced by a strategic schematic of lines and symbols and target designations that cast a clinical veneer over the whole, depressing affair.
It was not the first setback that Marcus Valerius had faced in his military career but he wondered if it would be the last. The Therion vice-Caesari pulled his attention away from the main screen on the command deck and returned his gaze to the small communications monitor in the panel beside him.
‘The batteries at Milvian must be silenced by midday at the latest. There can be no further delays. Our success depends upon it.’
Looking at the stern face of Commander Branne in the monitor display, Marcus knew that the Raven Guard captain was not employing hyperbole. If Branne said the campaign hinged on his army seizing Milvian in the next eighteen hours, then he could be sure that it was the truth.
Though Branne kept his tone even, free from accusation, Marcus was well aware that he deserved far harsher treatment. The initial attack on Milvian had stalled early on, and the Therion Cohort had been forced back in some disarray.
But it was a setback that the vice-Caesari was determined to rectify.
‘Everything is being prepared for a fresh assault at dawn,’ Marcus assured the Raven Guard commander. He had rushed the initial attack, perhaps out of overconfidence, or simply eagerness. More than seventeen hundred Therions had paid for the mistake with their lives. ‘I have determined a new attack approach that should see us break through to the batteries this time. We will engage with full force and nothing less. Your ships will be clear for low orbital attack.’
‘We are poised to strike a deadly blow,’ Branne continued, labouring a point that he had made several times before. Marcus accepted the reminder in silence, head bowed. ‘Your advance on the second capital, Milvian, has sent much of the traitors’s higher command fleeing to a bunker complex thirty kilometres south of the city. They will not remain there for long. The Raven Guard will fall upon the renegade commanders with gunship and drop pod in eighteen hours’s time; providing that the Therions and their auxiliaries can take Milvian and silence the defence lasers and other anti-orbital weapons guarding the city’s surrounds.’
Branne did not need to reiterate what was at stake. With the taking of Milvian and the elimination of the traitor command, the world of Euesa would be returned to the Imperial fold and with it control of the Vandreggan Sector.
There was nothing Marcus could say that would not sound like excuses or argument to the Legiones Astartes officer. ‘Yes, commander. The Milvian batteries will fall.’
‘Confirmed. Is there anything else?’
There was, but Marcus kept his thoughts to himself. There was the dream.
But the bustling command centre was no place to discuss a private matter between Valerius and Branne.
‘Nothing, commander.’
‘That is reassuring, vice-Caesari. Fight well.’
The display shimmered and then disappeared. Marcus issued a few orders for forces to move forward and cover the retreat. Assured that all was being done that could be done, the weary vice-Caesari left the command deck and returned to his chambers.
A gentle cough attracted his attention and he stopped to look at Pelon, who was waiting expectantly by the closed curtains across the window. The youth was maturing into a slender but muscled young man, and bore his rank of sub-tribune with pride. It was hard to reconcile the determined figure accompanying Marcus with the easily-startled boy who had been assigned as his manservant ten years before.
‘Yes, Pelon?’ said Marcus.
‘Shall I let in some light, vice-Caesari?’
Valerius waved a hand in ambivalent rep
ly, dismissing the distraction as he started pacing, exhausted in body but his mind whirling with the implications of the defeat. Pelon took this as permission and drew on the cord that pulled back the heavy drapes. The last rays of bluish sunlight streamed in through a trio of arched windows, revealing wooded hills and slate-grey clouds.
Marcus stopped, taken aback by the view. He had been so occupied with the attack that he had not looked out at the landscape of Euesa for several days. He strode to the window and watched as a tree-crowned hill slid past.
Of course, the hill was not moving; the relative motion came from the massive Capitol Imperialis transport that served as Marcus’s headquarters. Eighty metres long and fifty high, the Contemptuous trundled relentlessly forwards at no more than a brisk walking pace, carried on long tracks, its slab sides dotted with viewports and weapon sponsons. Five kilometres away was another lumbering Imperialis – the Iron General commanded by Praefector Antonius, Marcus’s younger brother.
Each of the super-heavy war engines carried two companies of the Therion Cohort – one hundred men and accompanying battle tanks – while a host of Mechanicum tech-priests, adepts and servitors tended the massive behemoth cannon and hundreds of secondary weapons.
Around the pair of transports the rest of the Therions advanced, on foot and in troop carriers, seven hundred thousand men in all. Amongst them strode the Scout and Battle Titans of the Legio Vindictus, supported by several thousand mechanically-augmented skitarii, sagitarii, praetorians and heraklii, along with dozens more strange war engines and service vehicles.
There were other super-heavy vehicles in the army – Baneblades and Shadowswords, Stormhammers and Leviathans of the Capricorn 13th Suppression regiment – alongside hundreds of Leman Russ tanks, Chimera transports, Hydra anti-aircraft cannons and many other tanks and war engines. With them came Gryphons and siege bombards, Basilisk assault guns and mobile missile platforms.
In the two and a half years since the new Therion Cohort had been blooded at the Perfect Fortress of the Emperor’s Children, Marcus’s army had grown strong indeed.