Khârn wiped his face and replaced his helm, masking his features in the grille-maw and slanted eye lenses that the Imperium was already coming to dread.
‘Erebus was wrong,’ the World Eater pointed out. ‘And I saved you seven times on the way up this beautiful war machine.’
‘Only seven? You’re still alive because I saved you at least a dozen times.’
The brothers shared a smile neither of them could see and thudded their bracers together. Once-white gunships, now stained red by the storm, came in low over the fortress and burned their engines hot to hover above the battlements. Crew ropes dropped from open hatches, and the World Eaters abandoned their towering prize to redeploy elsewhere.
Argel Tal turned to move with Khârn, but Raum stirred in a weary slither.
The Deceiver comes.
He didn’t deceive us, the Word Bearer replied. He was merely wrong.
I want to kill him. I want his blood.
He brought back Cyrene. He warned me about Khârn. I owe him.
All we owe him is pain. Cyrene is dead, her Second Breath taken for nothing. Now the Deceiver comes to speak more falsehood and ape emotions he cannot truly feel. Kill him, brother.
I cannot kill everyone in the galaxy purely for the sin of being despised. There would be no one left.
Khârn was tilting his head, staring through his helm’s eye lenses.
‘You’re speaking to the daemon, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can almost hear it. It makes my gums ache.’ Khârn shook his head as if dislodging an unwanted thought. ‘The Nails are biting. I can’t stay.’
Argel Tal spread his raked and bleeding wings. They rose high from his shoulder blades, chiropteran and thick-veined, rattling in the rain.
‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘I’ll rejoin my Legion and see you at the muster.’
‘So be it. Good hunting, brother.’
The centurion jumped from the battlements, catching a hanging crew rope and hauling himself up into the last gunship. As its engines flared and carried it away, Argel Tal closed his wings back against his shoulders again. He heard the bootsteps he’d known were coming.
‘You look weak, my son,’ said Erebus from behind him. Argel Tal leaned on the battlements, the blood rain washing his armour.
‘I feel weak. I spent several hours on the front lines, being stabbed and cut and shot, trying to defy your prophecy.’
Kill him, or yield control of our body, so I may kill him.
No, I have to hear this.
Erebus walked out from a tower onto the battlements to join his former pupil. His crozius was pristine, unmarked by gore, as was his armour. Argel Tal noted it with a disgusted shake of his head and looked back over the warring city, beginning to drown in blood.
‘Khârn lives,’ Erebus said. ‘That’s good, my boy. He has to live. The Powers have so much hope for the Eighth Captain, you know.’
Kill him, Argel Tal. Kill him now.
Be silent, Raum.
‘What do you mean?’ Argel Tal asked aloud. Erebus’s scholarly face, so solemn and stern, softened for a moment as he met the other Word Bearer’s gaze.
‘Khârn has been chosen.’
‘By the gods?’
‘Of course,’ Erebus replied. ‘Who else?’ He took a breath, pushing away from the battlements and pacing the wall. Argel Tal’s wings twitched and itched as Erebus walked away. He watched the Legions fighting in the city below, driving back the Ultramarines, pushing them through the streets back to their landing sites.
‘Argel Tal,’ Erebus said quietly. The inflection was strange; despite saying the name, it didn’t sound as if he was speaking to the other warrior.
‘Wh–’
KILL HIM. HE FORCED US TO FIGHT FOR THE SLAYER’S LIFE SO WE WOULD BE WEAK N–
The ritual dagger slid into Argel Tal’s spine, gentle as a lover’s touch. Raum’s furious cry trailed away, faded, and not even an echo remained.
For the first few seconds, there was nothing. When pain blossomed from the wound, it did so like something unfolding cold inside him, wrapping around his bones. He staggered, claws scraping over the metal battlements, all strength sucked from him. Claws? Hands. His hands scratched at the battlements. A legionary’s hands. A legionary’s weakness.
Raum. Raum!
There was no Raum. The daemon’s absence was a shock many times more painful than the knife.
Argel Tal’s helmet slipped clear, baring his too-human face to the downpour. He tasted the blood of countless innocents slaughtered in the Shadow Crusade. It stung his eyes, and he couldn’t summon the strength to wipe his face clean.
The knife came free with a jerk and the crunch of violated meat. It took the pain with it, flooding his muscles with a hatefully pleasant numbness.
Erebus stood patiently, watching Argel Tal collapse. In his hands he held a knife the length of his forearm, bone-handled and engraved in Colchisian runic script.
‘It was always you,’ the Chaplain said. ‘In every one of the Ten Thousand Paths, your erratic, emotional foolishness leads us to lose the war. You had one last chance to turn away from this fate, if you could just overcome the death of that worthless whore-priestess. But no. You begged me to bring her back, and in doing so proved you were as worthless as she was. You cannot be relied upon. You cannot be trusted. You cannot, for want of a better word, be controlled. And we need control if we are to win this war, my boy.’
Argel Tal coughed blood, reaching a trembling hand out to drag himself closer to his killer.
‘Don’t fight it.’ Erebus shook his head. ‘I confess I’m amazed you can move at all. No one else has been able to move after the killing stroke. What a saddening moment to discover you’re stronger than I thought.’
Argel Tal crawled another metre closer. Erebus smiled, resting a boot on the Vakrah Jal’s hand. Ceramite started to split and crack, but there was still no pain.
‘Khârn has been chosen,’ the Chaplain stated. ‘And in every future I saw, the one thing that altered his fate… was you. You, my boy, would have saved him. I am Destiny’s Hand, Argel Tal. Can you even conceive of my role and responsibility? You would break my path and change Khârn’s fate. I cannot allow it. Let him carve his destiny free of your fraternity. Immortality awaits him this way.’
Argel Tal lifted his head, speaking through clenched teeth. ‘I die,’ he breathed, ‘in the shadow of great wings. Not here. Not here.’
Erebus stepped aside. Behind him, the fortress tower was marked by the Imperial aquila, streaked with blood from the hellish storm. The two-headed eagle stared into the rain, its wings wide and proud.
‘So you do,’ Erebus agreed, and the Chaplain turned away. ‘Goodbye, my son.’
The Contemptor was relentless, reaching for him, clawing at him, driving him back. Lorgar parried every blow with Illuminarum, each cathedral-bell clang meshing with the great song. His muscles ached from the Communion’s cunning assault. Even his bones hurt from their insipid little ambush. Concentration was a poor jest.
Behind Lhorke came the coven of Librarians – their survivors at least – bolters high and force weapons raised. He could feel their weakness, their hesitation after being so cruelly torn apart as the Communion. But they still came. The fire and lightning bathing their blades flew forth in a hybrid of elemental rage. Lorgar willed a protective barrier into being, but his focus was shattered. The barrier shattered with it, leaving him open to the fire.
But it was weak. As weak as he felt, they were even weaker. The flames gusting towards him paled and dispersed, sucked into the red inferno where Angron had been. The lightning veered with it, whip-cracking away to join the conflagration. What blasted against Lorgar’s armour was a thin remnant of their rage, scorching his flesh, igniting his cloak, and met with a telekinetic wave in reply. Lorgar
poured his sapped strength into it, literally shouting them from their feet with a sonic bellow.
Iluminarum came up, warding back another of Lhorke’s sweeping blows. Vorias’s wretched coven refused to face their defeat, clambering back to their feet and opening fire again. Several of their bolts struck Lhorke himself – the Contemptor didn’t even notice.
One of them took the Word Bearers primarch in the thigh, blasting his armour open to the bone. He staggered, lifting the crozius only to have it knocked from his hand by the Dreadnought’s claws. He didn’t see where it flew, only that it spun away over the surrounding bodies, hopelessly lost.
Lorgar raised his hand to hurl secret fire of his own, but his hand burst in a bolt shell detonation, exploding in fragments of meat and bone. Before the pain even took hold, he powered the other fist through Lhorke’s carapace, digging for the corpse-pilot within. The Dreadnought howled, falling back, leaving Lorgar with one remaining hand clutching a fistful of iron and wire.
He saw Esca, Vorias and the others. Haskal died the moment Lorgar turned his eyes on the warrior, and as the primarch clawed the Librarian’s soul from his skin, he sensed that Haskal had been the one to land the bolt shell that blew off his hand.
The others kept coming. They threw fire, lightning, wind… Lorgar battered it all aside, staggered but still standing.
The Ruinstorm. Angron. The great song. The Communion. The Dreadnought and the coven. He was tired enough to lie down and die. No living being had channelled so much psychic power in the history of life itself.
Another Librarian died – this one speared through the throat by a fallen sword. Lorgar lifted it telekinetically with his violated arm and hurled it home, straight and true.
He staggered again, and this time he went to his knees. The whine of gunships fighting the storm’s wind howled above him, but they were too late, too late. He couldn’t beat back Lhorke and the coven while defending against their unleashed energies.
Salvation came from the unlikeliest place.
‘My brother!’
The primarch butchered another of the advancing Librarians, repelling the warrior’s fire and forcing it to wash back over the War Hound. Despite everything, Lorgar laughed as Angron roared and came to his aid.
Khârn hit the ground running. With nowhere to land in the inferno raging across the hilltop, their gunship hovered at the bottom, letting the World Eaters leap down into the blood-flooded street.
He had no idea what was happening up there. Even so, it pulled at him, making the Nails bite deep, turning the chemicals in his brain to acid. Every step closer made the pain fade a little more. Each metre brought him closer to serenity. He would have killed anyone, even his own primarch, to banish that pain and chase that peace.
Kargos was with him, keeping pace as they half-ran, half-hauled themselves up the desecrated hill. Legionaries from across the city were streaming closer, scrambling up the hill, chasing the same promise of peace. Their primarch was calling, though they knew not how. All that mattered was flocking to his side, among the red fire and the blood rain.
They saw Lorgar, driven back and bleeding. They saw the last living members of their forgotten Librarius standing with Lhorke, ringing the wounded primarch. They saw the fire alive with the shadows of the dead.
And they saw Angron.
Every World Eater stood frozen before the fire. The reflection of a god’s son played across their eye lenses as it rose from the flames of a Hell the Emperor had sworn didn’t exist.
Even Lhorke turned to face his gene-sire.
‘My brother!’ Angron roared again. ‘Hnngh. Traitors, traitors, seeking my brother’s blood.’
‘Sire,’ the war machine rumbled, but all sense of what to say died when he saw what Angron was becoming. The Change wasn’t finished – red flame still blazed in the primarch’s flesh, and where the flames receded, they roared higher elsewhere on his abused form. Blood shook from him with every movement. Beneath the fire, Lhorke saw a sliver of what was coming to be.
The primarch’s scarred flesh was the inhuman red of bare meat, armoured in bone fused with blackened bronze. He saw impressions only: a colossal molten thing, an avatar of volcanic anger, its flesh steaming in the foul rain and its clawed boots boiling the puddles of blood littering the earth. He was still growing, still rising, his entire form rippling to the warp’s music. The great song was more than a harmony to rewrite the void; it was the tune destined to rewrite a primarch’s genetic coding while immolating his very soul. Through the fire, something purer would emerge into the material realm. Something immortal, composed wholly of rage, not subject to pain or the mortal prickings given by the Butcher’s Nails. Lorgar had composed the warp to perfection.
Lhorke never saw the metamorphosis end.
The claw that crashed against his ironform tore the Contemptor-shell apart, sending wreckage tumbling across the ground. The biological revenant that was Lhorke himself – a crippled and withered corpse – broke against the rough earth, still trailing its life support cables and milky with amniotic fluid. It gave one breath, a sudden, sharp inhalation, and moved no more. Blood filled its open mouth and washed over its wide eyes.
The primarch-beast turned to the Librarians. The creatures that had pained him for decades. The warriors that had made the Nails sing and his brain bleed just for the sin of standing near them. Now they moved against his brother, hurling their foulness at Lorgar, who crouched one-handed and wounded, down on his knees.
‘Traitors,’ the thing breathed. Its maw cracked and stretched, iron teeth lengthening into rusted sword-fangs. The Butcher’s Nails were a thrashing, dreadlocked crest, hissing and buzzing in the rain.
Each of them tasted a different doom. Vorias, eldest of all, was struck blind by his eyes bursting in their sockets. He died in a strange peace, not hearing his gene-sire at all, hearing nothing in fact except for Lorgar’s exultant chanting. He thought the Word Bearers lord was laughing – and indeed, he was right.
Several of the others died from embolisms, brain haemorrhages, and in one case, Ralakas’s skull detonated as though struck by a bolt shell, showering bone fragments and bloody-grey ooze across his last living brothers.
Those who sought to escape met the implacable forms of their armoured kindred standing vigil on the other side of the flames. Kheyan crashed headlong into a centurion, lifting his bleeding gaze to the officer’s visage.
‘Khârn…’
Hands gripped the fleeing Librarian – his throat, his wrists, his shoulder guards. Kargos and the others hurled him back through the shrieking fire. He crashed onto the corpse-mound, to lie before his primarch’s mercy. Angron’s stormcloud-shadow fell over him, but the last thing Kheyan saw was Khârn watching in silence through the flames.
Esca was the last to die. He didn’t know which of his brothers threw him back across the fire, but he picked himself up and held his broken axe at the ready. Angron towered above him – Angron, who was eating Kheyan’s corpse. An armoured torso and one arm rattled down the primarch’s monstrous gullet. He even heard the muted hiss of digestive acid doing its corrosive work, deep inside the great beast’s body.
It was the roar that hurled him from his feet. Angron’s eyes ignited in the sockets of that malforming skull, triggering a roar that shook the sky. It sent Esca crashing back to the ground, weaponless and aching from too many torn muscles for his retinal display to track in one scan.
Esca rose again, scrambling to his knees, looking up at the face of Lorgar Aurelian, Lord of the XVII Legion. Viscous lifeblood bathed the Word Bearer’s serene features.
‘You should thank me,’ Lorgar said. ‘Your whole Legion should thank me.’
Esca snarled up at the primarch, all words failing him. A shadow draped over him from behind: Angron – or whatever Angron was becoming – was drawing close.
‘Blood,’ said Lorgar, lifting his cro
zius, ‘for the Blood God.’
‘They’re running.’
Feyd Hallerthan had been accused of arrogance in the past, and was accordingly proud of his appearance. As he looked into a sliver of glass in his hands, he had to confess he’d never be handsome again. Not without extensive facial reconstruction.
He dropped the knife of glass, letting it smash on the deck, and stared into the hololith with his remaining eye.
‘They’re running,’ he said again, then realised there were no higher-ranking officers to speak to. The only souls still alive on the Conqueror’s ravaged bridge were thralls, menials and servitors. Lehralla was a corpse hanging by the Medusa-cables of her augmetic links. Tobin was in similar health, impaled by a fallen ceiling girder-beam pinning him to the deck, right through his chest.
Dead Ultramarines lined the deck. Dead World Eaters populated the floor alongside them, along with a number of crew Feyd almost feared to count.
A few World Eaters walked here and there, their chainaxes idling. They seemed disorientated, but with their helmets on, Feyd had no way to be sure.
He recognised one of them, crested as a captain and anointed with enemy gore. ‘Delvarus,’ he called. ‘Where’s the captain’s body?’
Delvarus crouched, lifting wreckage aside and offering his hand down. Feyd saw Lotara take the gauntlet, and she was heaved to her feet by the massive legionary. Soot marked her face, and blood had crusted darkly down one side of her face.
‘Thank you, Del,’ she said. ‘I take back everything I’ve ever said about you.’
The Triarii smiled. She never saw it beneath his helmet. Hesitantly, the captain reached a hand to the split in her skull, where her hair was matted and grimy around the gash. ‘I have a headache,’ she said. ‘Feyd, you look terrible.’
Feyd’s smile was a guilty and childish thing. ‘They’re running, captain.’
She limped her way to the hololithic table. ‘The Ultramarines never run. They engage in fighting withdrawals and tactical retreats. And in this case, they’re right to do both.’ She gestured at the Trisagion’s rune, still pulsing with healthy vigour. ‘It galls me to thank the Word Bearers for anything, but that ship is a killer.’
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