Shadows in the Sand (Warhammer 40k, story)

[BuilderOne]

One held him beneath the shoulders. Another supported his legs. Together they lowered their heads, braced beneath the weight of their armor, and charged. Their boots struck the black glass in perfect unison.

They came to a sudden halt twenty feet short, dust and warped black glass cracking underfoot.

Koron stopped with them, as the absence surrounding him struck the barrier first.

Click to shrink...

It's a hilarious scene. I'm reminded of that "Use your head" meme from Toy Story

"She simply needs to find the last of her armor."

Click to shrink...

Oh? Look like the Lion knows something. Another Chenkov's gun?

 

[Talon88.1]

It's a hilarious scene. I'm reminded of that "Use your head" meme from Toy Story


Oh? Look like the Lion knows something. Another Chenkov's gun?

Click to shrink...

Ha! I had not actually thought of that, but damn it, it fits

And less Chenkov, this ones happening pretty soon.

 

[Fragment of Serenity]

At some point, I really need to have a scene where something along the lines of "the warp means it works this way and there is nothing that can stop it" and the response is "physics says 'get bent, weirdo". The resultant release of energy then cracks the planet in half.

 

[Talon88.1]

At some point, I really need to have a seen where something along the lines of "the warp means it works this way and there is nothing that can stop it" and the response is "physics says 'get bent, weirdo". The resultant release of energy then cracks the planet in half.

Click to shrink...

I can make that happen

 

[Talon88.1]

Chapter Seventy-Two

---

Reminder dear listeners, the Voxbox remains open at all times!

---

"She simply needs to find the last of her armor."

Guilliman, one hand braced against the writhing crimson-black flesh beneath him, turned his head toward his brother.

The movement cost him.

Even through the Lion's helm, even with its filters dragging what little purity they could from the arena's diseased air, his breath still rasped against his throat like broken glass.

"...I have no idea who you are talking about."

"Neither do I."

A tumbleweed slowly rolled by, the only sound in the silence.

It was the silence of three demigods, a dying Primarch, and an entire galaxy watching through servo-skull eyes as the absurdity settled between them.

"...Brother."

"Yes," the Lion said. "I know how it sounds."

Angron's growl rolled through the arena, deep enough to shiver the wet floor beneath their boots. His tail dragged behind him, blood hissing as it cut shallow furrows through the living meat.

The Lion did not look away from him.

"But the little whisper-man on my shoulder told me an ally is on her way."

Guilliman stared.

"...What."

Mortarion leaned forward, both hands wrapped around Silence. The great scythe rested easy in his grip, though his hunched back bowed by the smallest measure beneath the weight of rust, rot, and centuries of surrender dressed up as wisdom. Flies crawled through the rents in his armor. Spores drifted from him in lazy, corpse-pale clouds.

"Brother," he rasped, voice wet behind the rebreather's corroded grill, "are you certain your ten-thousand-year nap did not invite an early onset of dementia?"

"I am sound of mind, traitor."

"I am sure." Mortarion's dead eyes flicked toward Guilliman. "And where is this whisper-man now?"

"On my left shoulder."

The Lion's expression did not change.

"He is very small."

The Lion glanced toward his left pauldron.

The little robed figure clung to the edge of the dark green ceramite with both tiny hands, its brown hood tilted up toward him. Within the shadow of that hood, nothing resembling a face could be seen. No eyes or mouth. No gleam of spirit-light.

It whispered again, as though it had taken offense at Mortarion's tone.

The Lion's eyes narrowed.

Curious.

They could not see this entity.

Either way, a topic for later.

The toxin was growing in his chest.

He felt it with every breath. A damp heat behind the ribs. A slow, ugly pressure working its way deeper with each pulse of his hearts. The cuts across his cheek throbbed where Mortarion's rot had taken root, the skin tight and fever-hot beneath the blood.

He did not have much time.

Neither did Guilliman.

Angron was the louder threat. The obvious one. A red storm of muscle, iron, and divine hatred, circling with murder in every step.

But Mortarion was the true problem.

His spores filled the air. His patience poisoned the battlefield. His willingness to strike at Guilliman made every exchange a trap, and every breath the Avenging Son took inside the arena brought him closer to the edge.

For the next few minutes, the Death Lord was the greater danger.

So the Death Lord would fall first.

The Lion lifted the Shield.

Fealty sat low, ready at his hip.

Then the Lord of the First charged.

---

Captain Gabriel's thumb flicked the safety of his bolter off.

All around him, the gathered forces of the Imperium waited.

Silence held sway behind the hastily fortified battlements, not the silence of calm, but the silence of warriors counting heartbeats and ammunition. Astartes stood shoulder to shoulder behind walls that rose chest-high even on their armored frames, thick slabs of ceramite and adamantine dragged into place by servitors and Dreadnoughts. Lower firing ports had been cut for the Skitarii and heavy weapon platforms that filled the gaps between transhuman giants, their optics glowing red through the gloom, their gun-mounts tracking the black horizon with insectile patience.

The walls could withstand many a foe.

But the horizon was black with them.

"Restius," Gabriel said.

Behind him, within the cramped circle that now served as their communication hub, his battle-brother answered without looking up. Cables ran from his armor into a rack of vox-gear and borrowed cogitators, their screens jittering beneath waves of interference. He already knew the question.

It was the same one his captain had asked twice already.

"Enemy forces are estimated at near eleven thousand," Restius said. "Auspex detects roughly three thousand traitors, six thousand cultists, and two thousand demonic signatures."

He swallowed.

A small, human thing, despite the armor, the gene-forged body, and the century of war in his voice.

"Engine acoustics near three hundred. The few scans that have managed to punch through the interference put enemy air cover at over a hundred craft."

"Understood."

There was nothing else to say.

Gabriel flicked the safety back on.

Four hundred Astartes from a dozen Chapters. One hundred Custodes. Six hundred Skitarii. Three hundred heavy weapons platform servitors. Four Custodian Dreadnoughts.

With generous rounding, fifteen hundred loyalist soldiers stood against eleven thousand foes striking from three sides, while demons and demigods battled behind a barrier of the foulest warp sorcery.

And their hopes lay in the places Gabriel would have preferred to avoid.

Four of the five Grey Knights knelt near the barrier, silver armor washed blue-white by the ritual circle glowing beneath them. Their heads were bowed. Their voices were low. The air around them bent and shivered as they forced a linked portal open across impossible distance, tying this nightmare beachhead to Tigurius and the gathering reserves back at Imperial HQ.

Enough, hopefully, to allow a withdrawal once the barrier came down and the Primarchs were secured.

If the portal stabilized.

If the line held.

If the barrier fell before the enemy reached them.

Gabriel looked past the Grey Knights to the wall itself. The sorcery rose like a wound in the world, crimson-black and wetly luminous, its surface crawling with half-formed faces that pressed outward and vanished before they could scream. Beyond it, shapes moved. Giants. Monsters. Brothers killing brothers beneath a sky that had forgotten mercy.

They needed time.

Time was rapidly becoming a resource he could no longer afford.

Four minutes to contact.

His gaze climbed toward the summit of the arches, where another hope, a heretical one, dragged himself up a wall of bone and screaming flesh with his bare hands.

No banner. No litany. No angelic light.

One mortal-shaped absence crawling toward the heart of a god-wound with explosives on his back.

Gabriel flicked the safety off.

If he lived through this, his after-action report was going to be a nightmare.

---

Koron grunted and kicked his foot loose from another snapping mouth.

Its teeth cracked against his armor plates as the grapple on his left arm whined, hauling him higher along the screaming arch. The bone beneath him flexed like muscle. Veins as thick as power cables pulsed under the surface, carrying red light upward in ugly, rhythmic surges.

'Thirty-eight feet to the top,' Sasha said, her diagnostics and computations burning through his available threads as she devoured the data they had accumulated on the warp barrier. 'You have a plan?'

'Yeah,' he replied down the link, pushing off again and covering several feet in a single jump.

'...And that plan would be?'

'...In development.'

'Lovely.'

'You got one?'

'...No.'

'See? We'll be fine.'

Moments later, they reached the top of the arches.

The apex was not a platform.

It was an altar.

The eight arches met in a crown of bone and blood three hundred feet above the arena floor, forming a broad platform of living matter. An eight-pointed ritual circle had been carved across its surface, each line packed with black rot, red ash, and clotted blood.

Twelve robed figures knelt around it.

They had been human once, or near enough for the distinction to be a cruelty. Their bodies were swollen beneath plague-stiffened vestments, shoulders hunched, spines bent, voices bubbling through lungs that had long ago forgotten clean air. Flies crawled across the waxy skin of their throats. Every chant came out wet.

Around them stood twelve demons.

Blood-red. Horned. Too tall. Too lean. Massive blades hung low in their clawed hands, the molten edges dripping light onto the meat beneath their feet. Their heads twitched with barely contained hatred, their attention split between the priests they guarded and the mortal crawling closer to their god-work.

In the center of the circle lay another demon.

It had been opened from throat to groin.

Its ribs had been pulled wide like the petals of some obscene flower, and within the red ruin of its body, something green and wet bloomed. A plague-heart pulsed there, fat and rancid, each beat pushing red light and corpse-yellow fog through the lines of the circle.

Koron made his way closer to the inner barrier as another section of screaming flesh tried to bite his boot.

"Rael," he said over the vox. "I found the source."

Static hissed back, broken by the distant roars of Primarchs battling below.

"Describe it."

"Twelve priests around a ritual circle. Nurgle markings, I think. A dozen big red horned demons with swords standing guard."

"Bloodletters," Rael said.

"Lovely name," Koron muttered, watching the demons turn toward him. "One more in the center of the circle, with its chest slit open."

Below, Rael went very still.

Koron's sensors crawled across the scene, marking heat blooms, warp-flare, pulse timing, output channels. The circle was not simply glowing. It was breathing. Every line fed into the opened demon, and every pulse from the thing inside it fed back into the barrier below.

"It's not dead," Koron said, "though judging by the screaming, it wants to be. Its ribs are spread out, and there's something growing inside the cavity. Green. Wet. Looks like a tumor pretending to be a flower. Every time it pulses, the circle lights up red and green."

No answer came.

"Rael?"

Below, behind his silver helm, Rael's face lost what little color remained to it.

"That is not a barrier," the Grey Knight said.

Gabriel turned toward him.

"What is it?"

Rael's gauntlet tightened around his spear.

"A shared channel."

Koron looked across the apex, toward the opened Bloodletter and the plague blooming inside its chest.

Sasha's voice was very quiet in his ear.

'Two gods through one wound.'

Rael heard only Koron's breathing.

Then the mortal whispered, "They built this to kill a Primarch."

"No," Rael said. "They built it to make the killing mean something."

His gaze rose to the screaming wall, to the ritual meat, to the vast enclosed arena below where brothers murdered brothers for the eyes of a watching galaxy.

"This is not a cage. It is a mouth."

Above, Koron nodded and advanced.

The Bloodletters moved with him.

Their molten blades came up from their sides, slow and eager, dragging trails of orange light across the meat beneath their clawed feet. One by one, they spread into a line between him and the priests, horned heads twitching, black tongues sliding over teeth made for tearing.

"Rael," Koron said, "how dangerous are Bloodletters?"

"Lesser demons," came the quick, professional reply. "No ranged attacks. No psyker might. Powerful melee combatants. Inside your null-aura, they should be significantly weakened."

Then a slight grunt came over the line, almost swallowed by static and the thunder of battle below.

"Even so, do not let them close."

"Got it." Koron rolled his shoulders, feeling the meltabombs shift against his back. "I'm ready to hit the barrier up here on your mark."

"Copy."

Both arms came up.

The grapples fired into the crimson flesh, drills biting deep into the warp-born meat just outside the ritual barrier. The arch screamed beneath the impact, a dozen mouths opening along its surface before the drills tore through tongue, gum, and bone.

Koron crouched low, settling into a runner's stance as the lines pulled taut.

Below him, three hundred feet down, the gathered forces of the Imperium turned as one toward the barrier. Astartes raised bolters. Custodes lifted guardian spears. Skitarii targeting lenses burned red through the smoke. Servitor weapon platforms whined as their barrels spun up.

'It's weird, not having the gravity-plates,' Koron said.

'I wouldn't know,' Sasha replied, keeping her voice light even as the numbers continued to burn across his vision. 'I never had to worry about inner ears. I had gyroscopes.'

'Lucky. They—'

"Now!" Rael shouted over the comm.

The entire Imperial force opened fire.

The world became thunder.

Heavy bolters roared. Lascannons screamed white through the poisoned air. Plasma burst against the barrier in miniature suns, while guardian spears, autocannons, volkite, melta, and every blessed weapon the Imperium could bring to bear hammered the crimson-black wall from below.

Koron launched.

His grapples reeled in hard, dragging him forward as his boots tore through meat and gristle. For one savage instant, he was flying toward the ritual circle, the Bloodletters waiting beyond it with their blades raised and their hatred burning bright enough to stain the air.

Then he stopped dead twenty feet from the ward as his absence smashed into it.

Warp-lightning screamed across the invisible surface as the edge of his null-zone smashed into the barrier. The impact threw blue-white fractures through the air, crackling outward from a point he could not touch but could feel pushing back against every part of him.

Koron growled under his breath.

His boots skidded backward through the living arch. Meat tore beneath his heels. Both grapple lines groaned as their winches hauled him forward, motors whining, housings heating, every internal warning flaring yellow across his vision.

Every muscle in his body strained.

Every cybernetic tendon locked.

And inch by inch, he pushed against the damned wall.

Seconds dragged themselves apart in his eyes. His teeth clenched hard enough to ache as the ward pressed against the border of his existence, trying to find something to grip and finding only Sasha's silver thread braided through the hole where a soul should have been.

Come on you bitch, let me in!

A fraction of give.

Koron hauled himself forward harder, shoulders and back bunching beneath the armor as he shouted over the link.

"It's giving! Keep going!"

He did not hear a reply.

He did not need to.

The roar of weapons fire doubled as every gun turned from the perimeter and unloaded into the barrier.

Another fraction.

Before him, the Bloodletters shifted. Clawed hands tightened around hilts of bone and brass as they gathered around the spiderweb of cracks spreading from his contact point. Their rage rolled against him, hot and eager, but inside the edge of his null-zone it came muted, stripped of divine music, reduced to animal violence and hate.

Behind them, the priests voices rose in a guttural wail. Bloated hands reached toward the bruised sky. Fluid-filled throats warbled and tore as their chant became panic, their god-work shuddering beneath a pressure it had never been meant to endure.

But the cracks remained.

Growing with every second, as his null-zone chewed deeper into the wall.

"Almost in!" Koron shouted, feeling the heat of his grapple winches seep through the metal and into the flesh beneath.

'What are you planning to do about the demons waiting with swords?' Sasha asked, eyeing the eight-foot-tall demonic blenders.

'I'll figure that out once it matters!' he snapped back, sweat rolling down his neck as he—

The barrier cracked apart in a shower of manifested Warp, as though the air itself had become glass.

The Bloodletters charged.

Taloned toes dug into screaming flesh. Tongues lolled from fanged mouths as molten blades descended.

Koron hurled himself left.

Molten edges scraped across the blue-white flare of his shield. His shoulder hit the floor hard enough to jar the breath from his lungs. He rolled through the impact, legs tucked tight, then pushed off with both hands and sprang back to his feet in one smooth motion.

The demons did not hesitate.

They came baying for his blood, howls scraping a chill down his metal spine, their blades dragging fire through the air as the cracked ward bled dying light around them.

For a moment, his fingers inched towards his pistol, only for cold, ugly facts to stop him.

Whatever was happening, gravity was strange beyond his twenty feet. Firing the pistol outside the zone could be disastrous.

Even the smallest possibility of the displacement shot ending up in an ally or himself, meant he could not take the risk.

Instead, he would have to ignore Rael's advice.

Predictive models bloomed across his sight, ghostly images born of mathematics.

In some, he dodged.

In others, he blocked.

In some, he won.

In others, he died.

He was an engineer.

A military one, yes, but an engineer before anything else.

But even engineers had to know how to fight.

And for once, there was nothing here to try and save.

The genestealers had worn the faces of humanity, predators pretending to be people so they could better devour them.

Chaos cultists and Astartes might be saved, given time and resources, of which there was never enough.

But demons?

True, warp-born demons?

They were shards of powerful monsters that ate and drank the suffering of others. Ancient predators that gorged themselves on the wellspring of life itself.

No.

Not with Guilliman so close to the edge.

Not with Angron's screaming humanity still ringing in his ears.

'Sasha,' he said, their time compressed as he spun all six threads of his mind into one unified rope.

'Be ready to take over the cybernetic limbs.'

'Ready.'

His arms shifted, plates opening, retracting, overlapping. Tools withdrew deeper into the forearm. Armor snapped into place over the knuckle actuators, metacarpal frame, and articulated finger struts with hard, final clicks.

Sensation faded.

Enough to feel.

No longer enough to bother.

The work they were about to do did not need exacting precision after all.

---

The Bloodletter knew prey.

Prey screamed.

Prey ran.

Prey bled hot and bright and beautiful beneath the eye of the Lord of Skulls. Prey filled the air with fear, and fear became rage, and rage became song, and the song became the hand that drove the blade.

This one had fear.

It had smelled it.

The little metal thing had come through the cracked ward stinking of sweat, pain, burned machinery, and mortal terror. It had been small. Breakable. Wrong, yes, wrong in the way cold ash was wrong inside a furnace, but still prey.

Then something changed.

The Bloodletter charged.

Its hellblade fell.

The prey moved.

It had seen faster prey. It had seen slower.

This was... wrong.

The prey moved correctly.

The blade scraped blue-white light and found no meat. The prey rolled beneath the cut, rose without the stuttering panic mortals carried in their bones, and turned toward the next strike before the first had finished missing.

The Bloodletter snarled.

Around the prey, the song thinned.

The red thunder of the Blood God did not vanish. Nothing could silence Him. Nothing could silence rage. But within the circle of the prey's absence, the song became distant, as though heard through stone and deep water. The Bloodletter's limbs felt heavier. Its hatred remained, but the joy of it guttered.

The prey looked up.

The thing's helm gave no expression.

Its breathing steadied.

Its hands opened and closed once, plates locking over metal fingers with small, final clicks.

The Bloodletter saw paths then, born of instinct carved into its essence.

It saw the little thing dead beneath twelve blades. It saw its skull split. Its limbs pulled free. Its spine torn loose and raised high beneath the red sky.

But it also saw other endings.

A blade turned by a wrist that should not have known the angle.

A knee destroyed by a strike too small to matter until the leg failed.

A throat opened not by strength, but by timing.

A hellblade caught for half a heartbeat, just long enough for the wielder to die.

The Bloodletter hissed.

The prey was still sweating fear inside its flesh.

It simply no longer listened.

The Bloodletter lunged again, and this time the little metal thing came forward to meet it.

It swept its greatsword down, aiming to split the metal thing from shoulder to hip. It was heavier inside the thing's empty space. Slower.

Fast enough still.

Until it was not.

The thing's arm snapped out like a spear, orange-white light bursting along its length.

Heat bloomed across the Bloodletter's neck.

Heat, pain, and the tickle of ants chewing beneath its flesh.

As it discorporated, it saw what the prey had done, and its lips peeled into a feral grin.

Not prey.

Good.

A death by a fellow predator was worthy.

---

The thermal blades jutting from Koron's forearms snarled with captured heat, the faintest shimmer of gravitic distortion thrumming alongside the glow.

His legs bent.

He moved under the beheaded demon as it fell, using its body to hide from the next of its kin already charging.

The Bloodletter's blade cleaved through its dead brother's torso with ease.

Then it howled as Koron's left-hand blade sank into its thigh, his right burying itself in the demon's chest before ripping down in a spray of black blood and false organs.

Two down.

Ten to go.

One Bloodletter on the right.

One on the left.

Right high, toward his neck.

Left low, toward his hips.

Arm blades catch. Right leg forward.

A third demon.

The blade-tip speared through the remains of its brother and buried itself in Koron's chest, his shield flaring as it caught the strike.

It had pulled the same trick he had.

Plates opened along his arms. His organic right arm emerged, the left little more than the shoulder and six inches of stump where the regrowing limb ended.

The grav-shear formed above his right palm, tiny emitters flaring to life as the sphere of shaped gravity crashed into the demon's blade.

He had expected resistance.

The crimson energy he had found burning beneath Angron's flesh had curled the boundary into smoke.

This did not.

The sword shredded apart beneath the tidal forces.

The broken splinters spun away as the shear buried itself in the Bloodletter's chest, coring out the warp beast's spine in a spray of black blood and burning marrow.

Three down.

Nine to go.

Two seconds before the next reached him.

The demon on the right skittered its blade up his forearm, snapping the edge toward his chest.

Duck. Close the gap.

Spiked knee rising to create distance.

Tilt two degrees off-center. Half step right. Full step left. Slide past the knee strike.

Right cyberlimb hooks under and lifts.

Balance taken.

Left cyberlimb fires at the second demon.

Lightning crackles.

Thunder claps.

Not dead.

Right arm pushes grav-shear into the lifted demon's hips and up through the chest cavity.

Dead.

Four down.

Eight to go.

New contact.

Left arm catches greatsword. Hurls over back.

Demon deflects.

Half second bought.

Two demons sweeping wide to flank.

Survival odds decreasing.

Wounded demon snaps spiked tail.

Purposefully fall back over it. Cyberlimbs catch. Rebound.

New contact's sword misses by three centimeters.

Grapple snaps out. Buries itself in the demon's skull. Catches on horn.

Pull.

Roll over its back.

Distance between flankers.

Thermal/grav-shear forearm blade cuts through its neck on the follow-through.

Five down.

Seven to go.

Wounded demon: one-point-two meters away. Advancing.

Two flankers: line ruined. Charging. Impact in two-point-nine seconds.

More demons charging. Wider angle. Encirclement in three-point-two seconds.

Predicted strikes multiplied across his sight.

Twelve.

Twenty-six.

Fifty-three.

Survival odds collapsing.

Untenable.

Change the field.

Ritual circle disruption: best option.

Distance: thirteen-point-three meters.

Demons slower.

Estimated activity window: four seconds.

Enough.

Meltabomb timer: two-second delay.

Through ritual circle.

Air contamination outside null-radius: extreme.

Inside radius: nominal.

Bomb activated.

Release.

Helmet audio sensors auto-muted.

---

The explosion above was distant, dull even to Abaddon's transhuman hearing.

The result, however, was not.

The barrier visibly flickered.

He cast his senses toward it, holding his features in the calm, implacable mask he wore for the servo-skulls.

Something had happened at the anchor point above the arena.

Abaddon looked to the corpse-worshipping fools beyond the wall, their weapons silent for the moment, their hope not yet brave enough to become sound.

Below, the Lord of the First still battled the Red Angel and the Death Lord.

Abaddon had to admit, the First was an instrument of martial skill without peer. His bladework was a thing of terrible, cold beauty, his footwork precise yet far from predictable. Every step denied certainty. Every cut punished assumption.

As much as he hated the thought, Abaddon was not too proud to recognize fact.

If he faced the Lion with only a blade, the First would take his head in six moves.

Which was why Abaddon never intended to face him with only a blade.

Setting the thought aside, he cast his senses up the stream of warp energy, feeling the joined, writhing threads of the gods power beneath his fingertips.

Khorne's blunt wrath, all heat and motion and copper in the mouth.

Nurgle's touch, slow and spoiled, bile pooling at the back of the throat.

He could feel it now.

See it.

The smoking ruin of his creation.

How?

How?!

The barrier was intact. Those blasted Grey Knights were still below, and the power they had displayed so far was nothing compared to the might of two gods pouring themselves into the rite, eager to see the last sons of the Anathema laid low.

The central runes had been blasted apart. The priests were little more than bloated, pus-oozing piles of gore. The Bloodletters had vanished, their essence sent screaming back to their father.

The other seven points of the greater rite remained, but without the central nexus, they were running on whatever power had already been banked.

A dying machine still spinning because momentum had not yet abandoned it.

But more importantly...

No souls existed within the enclosed space.

No intruder.

No martyr.

No assassin.

No witch-light. No offering. No lingering scream.

Only damage.

Only absence.

What had happened?

---

Koron gulped down air, wiping sweat from his brow before his helm snapped shut.

The central runes were gone.

The rest of the massive, complex rune-circle was still intact.

And the barrier was still up.

"Rael," he said, grunting as he pulled two more meltabombs from his back. "Sending you my video feed. Tell me what else I have to blow up."

 

[zpiderpig]

Threadmark?

 

[Talon88.1]

Threadmark?

Click to shrink...

Gah! Added, thanks for the catch!

 

[BuilderOne]

"Rael," he said, grunting as he pulled two more meltabombs from his back. "Sending you my video feed. Tell me what else I have to blow up."

Click to shrink...

Any engineer worth his salt knows 2 things: how to build, and how to blow things up

 

[Talon88.1]

Any engineer worth his salt knows 2 things: how to build, and how to blow things up

Click to shrink...

Damn skippy
And meltabombs are very user friendly.

 

[Talon88.1]

Chapter Seventy-Three

---

Reminder dear listeners, the Voxbox remains open at all times!

---

Guilliman could feel the moment approaching.

Heat gathered across his brow, distinct from the fever-furnace burning beneath his skin as his body fought Mortarion's toxins. Every breath scraped hot through his lungs. Tension drew tight across his neck and shoulders as he watched Lion duck, turn, and parry beneath the unrelenting assault of Angron and the Death Lord.

Silence hooked against the Shield's edge with a shriek of metal and diseased bone, dragging Lion's guard wide and forcing him to answer Mortarion while Angron's blade was already screaming down toward his exposed flank.

Lion twisted beneath it.

Angron's cloven hoof stamped into the stone where he meant to step, pulverizing the arena floor and denying him the advance. Broken stone leapt beneath the impact. Mortarion used the stolen instant to withdraw, wings spreading behind him through the drifting smoke, ragged membranes shedding greasy droplets into the air.

They were adapting.

For all the hatred between the two demon Primarchs—for all the snarled insults, contemptuous glances, and ancient bitterness—they were learning how best to fight the First.

The realization chilled Guilliman more deeply than Mortarion's poison.

Lion vanished.

For an instant there was only shadow beneath Angron's blade, then a swirl of green leaves and cold silver rain swept across the scorched arena floor. The air smelled suddenly of wet earth and deep forests, impossibly clean amid blood, ash, and plague.

He reappeared behind Mortarion.

Dark green plate emerged from the rain like something ancient stalking between trees, and the Shield drove forward toward the Death Lord's spine.

Angron had been waiting.

His barbed tail came around with the force of a siege ram.

It smashed into Lion's side.

Ceramite shrieked beneath the impact. Plates buckled inward. Guilliman heard the crack even over the roar of battle, followed by something far quieter.

A grunt.

Blood snapped through the air in a bright crimson arc from wounds punched beneath the broken plate.

For a moment, Lion lost his balance.

Against almost any other foe in the galaxy, even that would have meant nothing.

Lion was already correcting. One boot scraped across shattered stone. His shoulders turned. The Shield was already coming back into line, sword rising with it, every movement economical and exact despite the blood spilling down his flank.

Against a demon Primarch, a heartbeat was an eternity.

Mortarion took a single backward step.

Then drove the spiked haft of Silence into Lion's chest.

Plague-bone struck ceramite with a wet, splintering crack.

The breastplate split.

Guilliman saw the impact travel through his brother's body. Saw his spine bow beneath it. Saw black-green fragments of armor spin away trailing blood.

Then he vanished again as shadow swallowed him.

Cold rain hissed against scorched stone. Leaves tumbled through smoke that had never known a forest. He emerged on the far side of the arena, several dozen meters away, Shield raised and sword held low at his side.

He gave the wound nothing.

No bent posture.

No ragged breath.

Lion stood as he always stood: straight-backed, silent, and composed, as though pain itself required permission before it could touch him.

The blood betrayed him.

It ran from beneath the cracked breastplate in thin streams, slipping across the plates of his abdomen before pattering steadily onto the stone.

Guilliman nearly stepped forward, stopping only as his hand tightened around empty air.

Damn the lack of a weapon.

Damn the poison burning through his veins, the torn flesh beneath his armor, the weakness that made every movement feel as though Mortarion had poured molten iron into his bones.

His brother had crossed ten thousand years to save his life.

Like hell would Guilliman stand here and watch him be ground down.

He shifted his weight forward—

An explosion tore through the arena from above.

The vaulted darkness overhead flashed white.

Something enormous ruptured beyond the arches, and broken flesh and bone came raining down in screaming chunks. Demonic howls struck the barrier. Severed limbs tumbled end over end through the smoky air. Sundered souls burned from within as they fell, flesh collapsing into sparks and greasy black ash before they ever reached the ground.

The barrier flickered as an intricate spiderweb of cracks raced across its surface.

Guilliman stared upward.

Outside the field, his sons moved almost instantly.

Power weapons hammered into the weakening barrier.

Blue-white lightning crawled across its surface beneath each strike. Terminators leaned into their blows with both hands, armored boots grinding trenches into the floor. Dreadnought fists crashed against it like artillery shells, each impact sending concentric fractures racing farther through the failing field.

Bolter fire thundered beyond them.

Someone was shouting.

Then another voice.

Then dozens.

For the first time since the barrier had sealed around them, Guilliman could clearly hear the battle outside enough to distinguish men from gunfire.

Behind his helm, Guilliman felt a grin begin to form.

His eyes found Abaddon.

The Warmaster still sat upon his throne as though the battle beneath him were some private performance staged for his amusement. Black plate swallowed the arena's failing light, broken only by baroque ridges of gold and the dull gleam of trophies worked into the armor. His pale face remained fixed upon the summit of the arches.

Guilliman followed his gaze.

Another explosion rolled through the small platform.

Muscle jumped in its seams. Dust spilled from the arches in pale curtains.

A second blast followed.

Then a third.

Each detonation punched deeper into the platform above, cracking support ribs and sending slabs of warp-flesh tumbling against the barrier. The structure groaned with every impact, bone grinding against bone.

By the fourth, Guilliman could see daylight through the fractures.

A section of the upper platform buckled inward, scattering rubble and burning fragments across the barrier below.

Still insufficient to tear the structure completely apart.

Enough, however, for Guilliman to finally see something on Abaddon's face.

Nothing so crude as surprise.

The Warmaster had carried the Long War for ten thousand years. Discipline had been carved into him alongside hatred.

His expression remained carved from pale stone.

Only the fingers of the Talon of Horus moved, the great claws flexing against the arm of the iron throne.

The barrier cracked further.

It bowed inward under another impact, its translucent surface rippling like glass caught beneath an ocean. Fractures crawled through it in branching lines of white and violet while the field screamed under the strain.

Beyond it, his sons.

Astartes roared their defiance through bolter fire and battlecry. Custodians struck in grim silence between shouted commands, auramite flashing through smoke and weapon-light. Dreadnoughts hammered the failing wall with fists meant to crack bunkers.

The arena trembled beneath them.

Then shadow fell across Guilliman, colder than the smoke overhead as the warmth bled from the air around him.

His gaze snapped upward.

Black ceramite filled his vision first, layered in cruel ornamentation and edged in gold dulled by ten thousand years of war. His eyes climbed past the trophies, the chains, the sigils of the Chaos United, until they reached Abaddon's face.

Close now.

Close enough for Guilliman to see the fine lines around those pale eyes.

Close enough to smell scorched metal, old blood, and the ozone reek of Warp-tainted machinery.

The Talon of Horus hung above him.

Its immense fingers were spread wide, each claw a razor-edged blade of black metal catching the strobing light of the dying barrier.

Abaddon looked down at him.

"Enough theater."

The Talon drove downward.

Its fingers folded together as they descended, forming a spearpoint aimed directly at the center of Guilliman's chest.

He saw exactly what Abaddon intended.

Punch through the breastplate, then close the claw and tear his spine out through the front of his body.

Guilliman had enough time to understand it.

A streak of sunlight through smoke.

Abaddon screamed.

The sound tore from him raw and furious as his killing blow was knocked off course inches from Guilliman's chest.

The Emperor's Sword jutted through the Talon.

Golden fire erupted from the wound.

Black metal glowed around the blade. Flesh beneath it blistered and split, spraying blood that hissed into steam before it reached the ground. The flames clung greedily to the ancient gauntlet, pouring through cracks in its armor like molten metal.

Abaddon staggered at the same moment the barrier came apart, shattering inward in a storm of luminous fragments.

His sons charged through them.

Terminators thundered across broken stone, each footfall heavy enough to shake dust from the fractured arches. Dreadnoughts followed through the breach like walking fortress towers, armored shoulders smashing loose masonry aside as weapons blazed over them.

Custodians came in gold.

Among the ruin near the breach, Acastian rested on one knee, his throwing arm still extended.

Guilliman looked from him to the sword buried through Abaddon's gauntlet.

The mad bastard had thrown the Emperor's Sword like a javelin.

Abaddon clawed at the flames crawling across the Talon.

His free hand closed around the burning metal.

Fire leapt onto it instantly.

He ripped it away with a snarl, armor smoking as ancient, animal instinct shouted its warning: touch the wound, tear away what burns.

The Emperor's fire cared nothing for instinct.

Guilliman rose up.

His right hand closed around the sword's hilt.

Heat flooded through his arm and into his chest, fierce enough that for an instant he thought the blade had set his veins alight.

Then he understood.

Mortarion's poison recoiled, the Warp-spoil burned from his blood in shrieking motes of corruption. The fever eating his organs broke beneath the golden heat, toxin after toxin incinerated as the Sword's radiance poured through him.

His back straightened.

His breath came easier.

His vision sharpened.

Guilliman twisted the blade free.

Abaddon snarled as the wound through the Talon tore wider.

Metal screamed.

Black blood sprayed.

Drach'nyen came for Guilliman's head.

The Emperor's Sword met it.

Fire struck shadow.

The collision detonated across the arena.

Golden flame surged from Guilliman's blade while darkness poured from Drach'nyen in writhing sheets. The air between them warped, screaming beneath forces that had hated one another since before either warrior had been born.

Guilliman rolled the strike aside.

Then riposted.

The Sword carved across Abaddon's breastplate.

Protective fields burst around the Warmaster in concentric flashes. One after another they shattered, dying in sparks as the blade crossed them, until golden fire kissed black armor and left a molten line burning across Abaddon's chest.

Shadow engulfed him.

He vanished.

Guilliman turned—

Abaddon reappeared twenty paces away amid a curl of black flame.

His lips had peeled back from yellowed teeth.

He flexed the Talon.

Only two of the five fingers answered properly.

Guilliman stepped toward him.

His knee struck the floor.

The strength that had flooded through him vanished almost as quickly as it had come.

The fire had cleansed him, but his body remained a ruin.

Pain surged through his abdomen. Freshly repaired muscle screamed around half-knitted wounds. His lungs convulsed as though offended by the very concept of continued service.

Then the arena disappeared beneath gunfire.

Bolters hammered. Adrathic weapons spat annihilating brilliance. Melta fire turned drifting debris to vapor. Plasma howled overhead while las-fire stitched red scars through the air.

Every weapon converged upon Abaddon, Angron, and Mortarion.

Gold slammed into place around Guilliman.

Custodian shields locked edge to edge.

Guardian spears lowered over them.

Broad auramite shoulders filled his vision as the Ten Thousand braced themselves between their wounded Primarch and the Warmaster.

Hands seized Guilliman beneath the arms and across his armor, and hauled him backward. Several Custodians strained together, dragging him with every scrap of gene-wrought strength their bodies possessed while others closed ranks over the space he had occupied.

Somewhere beyond them, an officer was screaming for the Lion to disengage.

Dreadnoughts answered.

Ancient war machines lumbered into the melee, fists wrapped in crackling power fields. One crashed into Angron's flank hard enough to shift the demon Primarch several inches. Another drove itself toward Mortarion through clouds of plague-smoke, armor already corroding beneath the fumes.

More Custodians flooded into the opening.

A wall of auramite and burning guardian spears formed itself between two Primarchs and damnation.

There was no doctrine for this.

No sensible battle plan.

Only bodies.

Only seconds.

Only men placing themselves where death would have to go through them first.

Abaddon strode into the wall.

He raised one hand before his face.

Obsidian wards flared around him.

Bolter shells vanished against them. Plasma burst into sheets of blue-white fire. Adrathic beams twisted apart and disappeared into hungry darkness.

Abaddon kept walking.

His teeth showed through the glare.

Then he reached the Custodians.

They met him together.

Guardian spears stabbed toward his throat, his hearts, the flexible joints beneath his arms. Misericordia blades flashed toward gaps in his plate. Weapons wrought by artisans whose crafts had required generations to perfect struck with the precision of warriors bred from birth for a single purpose.

They died.

Drach'nyen moved.

The blade carried the shadow of humanity's first murder.

The death of empires lived within its edge.

A demonic weapon that had once forced even the Emperor of Mankind to pay a terrible price.

Guardian spears met it and came apart.

Power fields burst.

Auramite opened beneath the blade as though some unseen hand had drawn a line through molten wax. Defensive shields unraveled into streams of fading light.

One Custodian lost his spear.

Then his arm.

Then his head.

Another drove his weapon into Abaddon's shoulder even as Drach'nyen entered beneath his ribs.

A third caught the demon blade upon his shield. The same stroke divided shield, arm, and torso.

Abaddon advanced through them.

Yet every meter cost him.

Adrathic beams chewed at his wards.

Guardian spears struck his plate.

Bolter shells burst across his joints.

Blades forced him to parry.

Bodies forced him to step around them.

Every Custodian demanded a motion.

A turn.

A strike.

A fraction of thought.

Each death bought fractions of a second.

Those fractions were all Guilliman needed.

Behind the wall of mankind's greatest warriors, he retreated.

Every step sickened him.

Bile rose in his throat. His lungs burned from poisons freshly purged. Stitched organs pulled painfully inside his abdomen while bones still knitted beneath damaged muscle and reinforced plate.

The Apothecarion had rebuilt him with skill, desperation, and what Guilliman strongly suspected was mounting personal resentment.

Four days.

The number surfaced with absurd clarity.

Four days since his previous battle with Abaddon.

Four days since he had been crucified against the wall of a Dark Age facility.

Four days between that and an arena deathmatch involving two demon Primarchs and the Emperor-damned Warmaster.

He could almost hear Calliade.

The Apothecary's voice emerged from memory with perfect, infuriating precision.

Bed rest.

Limited exertion.

Allow the organs to knit.

Try, for once in your impossibly long and catastrophically irresponsible life, to remain in one location.

Guilliman suspected Calliade might genuinely weld him to a bulkhead after this.

The threat had begun to seem medically reasonable.

His sons opened a path ahead.

Armored hands caught him whenever his legs faltered, one beneath his arm, another pressed against his back, half carrying him toward the portal burning at the far end of the arena.

The Grey Knights stood around it like statues carved from silver.

Warp-light spilled between them, the portal's edges twisting through colors human eyes had never evolved to understand. Psychic wards burned across the floor around their boots while the opening shuddered under the strain of being maintained inside a place so saturated with Chaos.

Safety lay through it.

Or something sufficiently close.

Behind him came the sound of Custodians dying.

Guilliman glanced over his shoulder.

Abaddon was still advancing.

Slowly.

Too slowly.

Guilliman's eyes narrowed.

A guardian spear stabbed toward the Warmaster's throat.

Abaddon caught it upon the Talon, twisted, and tore its wielder forward into Drach'nyen.

Another Custodian attacked.

Abaddon killed him too.

Measured.

Deliberate.

Almost leisurely.

Guilliman knew how fast Abaddon could move.

More importantly, he knew the bastard could teleport.

Twenty paces had disappeared beneath shadow moments earlier.

The Warmaster could have crossed this distance already.

He had chosen not to.

Understanding settled into place.

Abaddon was savoring it.

The Ten Thousand were trophies laid conveniently across his path, and he had every confidence that Guilliman could be reached whenever he wished.

He intended to let the Primarch approach escape.

Let hope take shape.

Then appear before him.

Face to face.

Because Abaddon would want to see Guilliman understand.

A thought entered Guilliman's mind.

Reckless.

Desperate.

Tactically obscene.

He could think of several passages of the Codex Astartes that would object on principle.

Guilliman looked once toward the portal.

Then back toward Abaddon.

Beneath his brother's helm, his grin returned.

He gave the order.

---

It was almost refreshing, being able to simply let loose and kill.

So much of Abaddon's existence was politics wearing the skin of war.

Ensuring none of the Four went too long without the proper sacrifice. Measuring what favor might be purchased with blood and what debt would be created by accepting it. Remembering every oath, bargain, insult, promise, threat, and account cultivated across ten thousand years of the Long War.

Always watching.

Always measuring.

How he could win.

How he could lose.

How the innumerable currents of destiny and history coiled around one another until cause became consequence became cause again, an Ouroboros forever devouring its own tail and somehow remaining whole.

Such was the nature of the Warp.

A monumental headache.

Killing was honest by comparison.

There was something beautifully uncomplicated about driving Drach'nyen through a man and feeling the resistance disappear.

And the opportunity to butcher the golden warriors of the Corpse-King was a rare pleasure indeed.

They came at him without hesitation.

Auramite flashed beneath the weapon-fire filling the arena, each Custodian rendered momentarily incandescent as plasma and las-fire strobed across polished plate. Guardian spears formed a forest of crackling blades around him, thrusting toward the vulnerable seams of his armor with machine-perfect coordination.

Their skill was undeniable.

Nowhere near the level of the First, of course.

Nor the paper-pushing Primarch being hauled through the ruins of his own rescue.

No mortal creature could truly keep pace with beings such as them.

But the Custodians came closer than almost anything else humanity could still produce.

One spear glanced from his gorget and gouged a molten channel through the black ceramite beneath.

Another struck his breastplate hard enough to flare three layers of wards in succession.

A blade slipped beneath the Talon of Horus and nearly found the softer armor at his elbow before Abaddon twisted aside and opened its wielder from shoulder to hip.

They showed no fear.

A wall of gold and blades dared him to advance and demanded payment for every step.

Abaddon smiled as he paid it.

Drach'nyen swept sideways.

A guardian spear parted at the haft. The Custodian behind it had just enough time to adjust before the demon blade passed through auramite, flesh, and spine.

Abaddon continued moving before the two halves struck the floor.

Another warrior took his place immediately.

Good.

His wards flashed beneath another impact.

Better.

Such pleasant distractions, however, were always short-lived.

Beyond the fighting, the Grey Knights still held their portal.

Silver-armored figures stood around the whirling gate with weapons lowered and psychic lightning crawling across their armor. The air around them bent beneath the pressure of their ritual, reality stretched thin enough to become translucent.

Through the opening came shifting glimpses of somewhere else, motion, hard light and the scent of smoke.

Between Abaddon and Guilliman, Astartes from dozens of Chapters had packed themselves shoulder to shoulder. Crimson, black, blue, green, white, bone. Heraldry from across the fractured Imperium formed a living barricade around their wounded lord.

Some braced shields.

Others knelt with rifles leveled.

Every one of them had apparently decided that his own body represented acceptable fortification.

An expected, if useless, response.

Guilliman was almost at the gate.

Abaddon decided he had indulged the moment long enough.

Reality bent.

The arena stretched around him.

For an instant, the stone beneath his boots seemed to fall away into impossible depth. Straight lines curved. Distance folded inward. The roar of battle became a low, wet murmur as the Warp sank its claws into material space and squeezed.

The place where Abaddon stood and the place where he wished to stand became adjacent.

One step. Perhaps less than one.

He would not kill Guilliman from behind.

There would be no blade through the spine while the Avenging Son crawled toward salvation.

Abaddon wanted him to see.

Wanted recognition.

Wanted the architect of the Imperium's final lie to see whose hand ended it.

The Warp released its grip.

The world snapped back into shape.

Abaddon stood before Guilliman.

Drach'nyen was already descending.

The Emperor's Sword rose to meet it.

Golden flame and snarling darkness collided hard enough to punch dust outward from the floor in a perfect ring. Lightning crawled across the nearby walls. Loose stone lifted and shattered beneath the pressure of forces that had no place within sane reality.

Abaddon struck again.

Guilliman parried.

A third blow came low.

The Avenging Son twisted aside and answered with a thrust that scraped burning gold across Abaddon's cuirass.

Blade struck blade too quickly for mortal eyes to follow.

Drach'nyen shrieked through the air.

The Emperor's Sword answered in sheets of incandescent fire.

Each collision sent concussive waves tearing through the battlefield, whipping cloaks and banners outward and forcing nearby Astartes to brace themselves against the floor. Shadows stretched in impossible directions. Dead oaths whispered from nowhere. Demonic faces surfaced briefly within the black wake of Abaddon's sword, mouths open in silent screams before dissolving again.

Guilliman fought well.

Even ruined, poisoned, stitched together, barely able to stand without assistance.

Infuriatingly well.

The Primarch caught a downward cut, rolled it aside, and attempted to take Abaddon's wrist.

Abaddon withdrew just enough.

Then returned the motion as a slash across Guilliman's chest.

Drach'nyen bit through the blue plate.

A clean line appeared across the breastplate, shallow enough that blood did not yet follow.

Guilliman staggered back one step.

Abaddon followed with half of one.

Then stopped.

The Primarch had collapsed to one knee.

Abaddon stared.

A wet rasp dragged through the filters of the winged helm.

Another.

Guilliman's chest rose too quickly, each breath shallow and bubbling with fluid somewhere deep in his lungs. One gauntleted hand planted against the floor to keep him upright while the other maintained its grip upon the Sword through what seemed to be stubbornness alone.

Surprise lasted only a fraction of a second.

Elation replaced it.

So.

The weapon had purged Mortarion's poison.

It had not restored the body underneath.

Around them stood Guilliman's sons.

Strangely, none intervened.

The nearest Astartes had his blade already drawn. Another stood scarcely three meters away with a bolter aimed directly at Abaddon's skull.

Custodians remained among them, guardian spears lowered. Their fingers tightened. Joints flexed. Weapons shifted by millimeters.

Yet none stepped between Abaddon and their fallen father.

Curious.

Abaddon lifted Drach'nyen.

The point settled before Guilliman's face. The demon whispered around him, eager enough that black vapor curled from its edge.

A new possibility unfurled in Abaddon's thoughts.

Crueler than killing him.

Far more useful.

"Yield, failed son."

His voice carried easily through the ruined arena.

"Swear yourself to me, and I will permit you to live."

The winged helm slowly tilted upward.

Guilliman looked at him.

For one strange instant, Abaddon thought he saw something behind the metal.

A smile.

"Now."

Every Loyalist moved.

Astartes hurled themselves sideways.

Custodians abandoned their formation and threw themselves flat.

The warriors nearest Guilliman seized the Primarch and dragged him bodily across the stone as Guilliman himself rolled with them, an order clearly anticipated and finally given.

Abaddon's satisfaction vanished as heat touched his back.

The sudden, savage pressure of an industrial furnace opening directly behind him.

Every sensor in his armor began screaming, threat runes flooding his vision.

Energy readings spiked beyond sane battlefield scales.

Abaddon started to turn.

He managed half a step as he raised Drach'nyen.

Wards ignited across his armor, rune after rune blazing into existence as every defensive instinct hammered through him at once. Black light thickened around his body. The Talon of Horus came up to shield his head.

Behind him, the Grey Knights' portal churned like a wounded star as a barrel pushed through.

Meters of reinforced housing, machinery designed for engines large enough to stride across cities.

The bore alone was broad enough to swallow a man.

Abaddon knew that weapon.

Everyone who had ever commanded armies knew that weapon.

A Volcano Cannon.

A Titan-killer.

For perhaps the first time that day, Abaddon had absolutely nothing clever to say.

Behind his blazing wards, his mouth opened.

Whatever words came out were swallowed by the cannon's roar.

---

+Hold output!+

Helix-47's binharic shriek tore across the vox-net hard enough to clip several lesser channels into static.

Around him, the Imperial command yard had become an altar to desperate engineering.

Reactors intended for entirely different machines had been dragged into a rough circle around the Shadowsword. Generator banks sat on improvised ferrocrete pads, cabling as thick as a man's torso snaking between them in glowing bundles. Capacitor housings had been bolted to the tank's flanks wherever there had been room, while priests, servitors, and Techmarines swarmed across the assembly like frantic insects around some wounded metal god.

None of it belonged together.

Which, Helix reflected, was a theological distinction best examined later.

Before them, the Shadowsword continued to fire.

The Volcano Cannon poured its wrath through the Grey Knights' portal in an unbroken lance of white so bright that every nearby surface had been reduced to stark planes of light and shadow. The air around the barrel warped into rippling glass. Dust lifted from the ground and flashed into sparks. Every exposed piece of metal nearby radiated furnace heat.

Warning runes bled crimson across every display Helix possessed.

Capacitor housings glowed cherry-red.

A bank of sacred breakers began flashing messages that translated, with varying levels of liturgical dignity, to stop doing this immediately.

Somewhere deep inside the Shadowsword, a relay exploded.

The blast punched sparks from an access hatch and carried three servitor-thralls with it.

Their replacements were already moving before the bodies hit the ground.

From within the tank came Tech-priest Ipsol-4's ecstatic cry.

+Archmagos! The Machine screams! In pain and wrath, she demands more power! More power to slay the Archtraitor!+

Helix's optic lenses contracted against the glare.

Across half a dozen internal channels, he could hear the Shadowsword protesting through thermal alarms, pressure warnings, voltage spikes, and increasingly creative machine-code obscenities.

Both of his arms, as well as every mechadendrite attached to his spinal manifold, rose.

+By the Motive Force, she shall have it!+

Commands burst outward in a storm of binharic.

+Feed the blessed capacitors! Feed them until they glow with purpose!+

Several adepts froze for approximately half a second.

Then obedience overcame self-preservation.

Switches slammed closed.

Reactor output climbed.

The white lance intensified.

A generator bank immediately began producing black smoke.

One of its warning bells started ringing with such frantic insistence that a priest turned and struck it with a wrench.

Across the yard, a Tech-priest shrieked over the vox.

+Archmagos!+

Helix rotated three optics toward him.

The priest stood waist-deep among ruptured coolant lines, his hands and mechadendrites dancing across a manifold that had begun spraying boiling vapor in every direction.

+Pressure collapses in sacred pumps seven, nine, and fifteen!+

Helix snapped a tendril toward him.

+If the coolant lines fail, teach them devotion! Open the reserve veins!+

The priest nodded and immediately tore open three emergency valves.

Coolant surged through the pipes.

Two lines burst.

A nearby servitor caught fire.

No one had time to acknowledge either development.

Another voice cut across the channel.

+Thermal excitation exceeds tolerance thresholds! Barrel integrity failure projected in twenty-seven seconds!+

Helix glanced toward the weapon.

The Shadowsword's enormous barrel had gone from black to dull red beneath its cooling shroud.

The orange was bleeding through.

Metal groaned.

The sound was deep enough to be felt through the soles of his feet.

+Recite the Canticle of Thermal Apology and keep the barrel aligned!+

A chorus of binharic prayer erupted around the tank.

Coolant flooded the barrel shroud.

The result was instantaneous.

Steam exploded across the command yard in a white wall, swallowing priests, servitors, and half the Shadowsword before being torn apart by the superheated air surrounding the beam.

Helix extended his legs to see over it.

The barrel was still glowing.

Several systems insisted it was now glowing more.

He muted them.

+The Machine is experiencing no overheating!+ Helix-47 declared across every Mechanicus channel.

The holy lie carried with all the authority of an Archmagos.

+She is experiencing righteous anger! Vent only enough wrath to prevent apotheosis!+

Behind him, Arthus-Phi—one of the few adepts to survive the orbital spire—sent an urgent burst of binharic directly into his private channel.

+Archmagos, even with supplemental coolant, the barrel is melting! We must disengage the beam!+

Helix turned.

Arthus-Phi stood beside a diagnostic altar surrounded by a constellation of red warning glyphs. Smoke curled from his robes. One cracked optical implant had still not been replaced since their return from the spire.

The barrel groaned again.

A glowing droplet of metal fell from its underside and splashed against the ground.

Helix considered the available evidence.

+No. Do not disengage the beam!+

Arthus-Phi stared at him.

Helix spread his mechadendrites toward the portal.

+If the Machine-God wished us to stop firing, He would not have placed the Archtraitor in front of the barrel!+

Several Techmarines turned toward him.

More adepts joined the chant.

Helix cranked his external speakers to maximum output.

The resulting feedback squeal briefly stunned a nearby servitor.

He raised both arms toward the Shadowsword, robes snapping in the thermal wind, brass icons of the Omnissiah clattering against his chassis.

+The Machine screams because she hates him!+

His voice rolled across the encampment.

+Today, we shall honor her hatred with amperage!+

The gathered priests roared their approval.

Power climbed again.

The Shadowsword screamed with them.

For several glorious seconds, man and machine achieved perfect spiritual unity through mutual disregard for operating tolerances.

Then it ended.

The portal snapped shut.

There was no thunder.

No collapsing vortex.

Only a single, unnervingly delicate crack.

Impossible geometry folded inward.

The closing gate passed through the end of the Volcano Cannon and sheared several meters of superheated barrel away with surgical precision.

The severed section vanished with the portal.

The beam, however, continued firing.

Without the gate to receive it, the unbound lance of stellar-white energy blasted across Imperial Headquarters.

+DISENGAGE! DISENGAGE! DISENGAGE!+

Hands slapped emergency controls.

Techmarines tore breakers open.

Servitors yanked physical disconnects.

Someone used an axe.

The Volcano Cannon finally died.

Silence crashed down over the yard.

Smoke rolled across the encampment in slow black banks.

Cooling metal ticked and popped.

Warning runes flickered across Helix's vision, lingered briefly as though reconsidering their usefulness, and began dying one after another.

Somewhere inside the Shadowsword, something large and extremely important made a sound like a cathedral bell being murdered.

Then silence.

Helix remained motionless.

Steam drifted around him.

A burning cable fell from somewhere overhead.

Across the yard, priests and Techmarines slowly looked toward one another.

Helix surveyed his students.

His peers.

The sons of Mars.

Several possessed scorched robes.

A Techmarine had somehow acquired a servitor arm that did not appear to belong to him.

Helix quietly lowered himself onto an overturned ammunition crate.

He brushed a layer of ash from his robes.

"There was no innovation here today."

No one moved.

Helix folded his hands.

"The machine spirit was simply…"

His optics passed over the half-molten Shadowsword.

"…angry."

Several adepts glanced around.

Biosigns spiked sharply.

One Techmarine looked toward the collection of illicit generator banks, auxiliary reactors, and capacitor assemblies surrounding the tank.

Then toward Helix.

He nodded first.

"Indeed."

The others looked to him.

The Techmarine drew himself upright.

"What holy spirit would fail to exceed her ordained limits when given the opportunity to slay the Archtraitor?" He inclined his head, barely a degree.

"Truly, a blessing of the Omnissiah."

Several priests immediately murmured agreement.

Helix studied them.

Then glanced over both shoulders.

His voice dropped.

"No report shall mention the secondary capacitor bypass."

One of the adepts blinked.

"What secondary capacitor bypass?"

Helix-47 inclined his head.

"Good man."

His optics shifted toward the tangled field of stolen machinery surrounding them.

Several generators bore forge markings from entirely different departments.

One still had a handwritten sign hanging from its side.

COMMANDER RESERVE POWER — DO NOT REMOVE

Helix stared at it.

Someone quietly took the sign down.

"Now," he said, "several generators appear to have migrated from their sanctioned locations."

A Techmarine looked toward the wreckage.

"How unusual."

"Extremely."

Helix rose.

"We should perform maintenance before the Inquisition arrives."

---

The Lion heard the cannon before he saw what it had done.

The roar rolled across the battlefield like a god clearing its throat.

Stone trembled beneath his boots. Dust shook loose from the shattered arches. For half a heartbeat, even Angron's assault faltered, the Red Angel's blade hanging motionless as his burning gaze snapped toward the far side of the arena.

Mortarion turned with him.

Plague-smoke curled from the vents of the Death Lord's armor, briefly washed white by the radiance tearing across the battlefield.

A lance of incandescent light had struck Abaddon.

The Warmaster was almost impossible to distinguish within it.

His silhouette flickered at the heart of the beam, black armor swallowed by white fire as the Volcano Cannon drove him backward through the arena floor. His boots carved trenches through molten stone before the ground finally gave way beneath him.

Then he disappeared into it.

The beam followed.

Earth erupted in sheets of glowing debris. Mud flashed into steam. Broken walls vanished into clouds of incandescent dust as Abaddon was driven through them, leaving behind a molten furrow that stretched across the battlefield like the scar of some colossal blade.

And still the beam continued.

The Warmaster remained somewhere at its center.

Still being pushed backward.

Still, somehow, refusing to disappear entirely.

For one peculiar moment, the battle paused.

Lion stared toward the smoking trench.

Angron snorted.

Mortarion's vast wings gave a single irritated flick.

Lion raised the Emperor's Shield.

Then all three returned to the considerably more immediate matter of killing one another.

---

Dirt ceased to exist beneath his heels.

Stone liquefied beneath his boots and ran away in glowing streams as the white beam drove into him with the force of a collapsing star.

Abaddon threw every ward he possessed into its path.

Black energy poured from the seams of his warplate in whipping banners. Runes carved into armor older than empires blazed one after another, defensive fields collapsing inward until every scrap of protection he commanded had been forced onto a single point before his chest.

The Volcano Cannon pushed against them.

Inches.

That was all that separated Abaddon from annihilation.

A few trembling inches of darkness between the incandescent beam and the flesh beneath his armor.

He tried to step aside.

The beam moved him instead.

His boots tore trenches through molten ground. Ruined masonry exploded against his legs. Entire slabs of stone flashed into vapor as he was driven backward through them, the battlefield peeling apart around him.

Too much force.

Too much energy.

There was no blow to turn.

No blade to parry.

No trajectory to evade.

This was a catastrophe one survived by enduring it longer than it wished to exist.

Heat stripped the air from his lungs. Pressure crushed against his breastplate hard enough to make ancient ceramite groan. White brilliance filled every optic, every sensor, every remaining gap in his vision until the world became nothing except pain, light, and the shriek of overburdened wards.

Through it all, he saw movement.

Beyond the beam.

Beyond the gate from which it came.

The Avenging Son was half stumbling, half being carried toward the portal, armored hands locked beneath his arms as his sons dragged him toward escape.

Using the same gate through which the cannon hunted Abaddon's life.

No.

Guilliman reached another step.

No.

The portal shimmered around him.

No no no no.

Abaddon's awareness snapped upward.

Toward the broken arches.

Toward the ritual circle.

The rite itself was ruined.

Shredded Warp-flesh marked where directing runes had once burned. Symbols crafted through sacrifice dissolved into oily smoke. Channels of power writhed blindly through the remnants, severed from the geometry that had given them purpose.

The ritual would never function again.

The reservoirs remained.

Storage runes still pulsed within the wreckage.

Still full.

Abaddon seized them, and tore them open.

The Warp poured through the broken circle in a black torrent.

It struck Abaddon like another weapon.

His spine arched.

Every muscle locked.

Darkness flooded into his armor, raced along its sigils, and erupted from the edges of his wards in sheets of violet-black lightning. Voices came with it—pleading, laughing, roaring, promising—thousands of demonic mouths speaking through the same instant.

His failing defenses surged.

The beam shuddered.

The Talon of Horus had been trapped against the cannon's fury, its wounded claws buried inside the blazing collision point.

He dragged it outward.

An inch.

Metal screamed.

Another.

The ruined fingers locked around nothing, refusing every command his armor sent them.

Another inch.

The Talon broke free.

Black lightning crawled across its claws.

Abaddon slashed at the air.

Reality opened.

A jagged wound appeared beside the Grey Knights' portal, black at its center and lined with snapping violet fire. The surrounding air buckled inward. The silver-armored Knights staggered as the geometry of their gate twisted violently against them.

Abaddon dragged the Talon sideways.

The wound widened.

The portal screamed.

Then came apart.

The Volcano Cannon vanished with it.

Silence arrived so abruptly that Abaddon almost mistook it for deafness.

He stood alone within the furrow the beam had carved across the battlefield.

Stone glowed beneath him.

Dark power sloughed from his armor in fading streams. His warplate smoked. Runes guttered across his chest.

The Talon of Horus hung at his side, two claws responding cleanly while the others twitched around weak sparks of half-dead lightning.

Abaddon drew a breath.

It hurt.

His grin formed anyway.

"Not enough, Guilliman!"

His voice carried through the ruin.

He spread his arms, the Talon's surviving claws catching the twisted light spilling from the shattered arches above.

"Even your god-killing machine could do no more than slow my steps!"

The words rolled across the arena.

Then Abaddon reached once more for the power waiting around him.

The Four answered.

Their gifts wrapped themselves around him with familiar hunger.

Khorne offered strength drenched in rage.

Nurgle offered endurance vast enough to watch civilizations rot.

Tzeentch whispered possibilities into the spaces between thoughts.

Slaanesh promised sensation sharpened beyond mortal comprehension.

Payment rendered across ten thousand years.

Oaths fulfilled.

Sacrifices made.

Debts carefully balanced.

Abaddon accepted exactly what he intended to accept.

One step.

The ground cracked beneath his boot.

Another.

Black power swelled through his body, threading itself through muscle and tendon, bone and nerve, then layering over his warplate like a second invisible skin.

Enough to strengthen.

Enough to hasten.

Enough to kill.

Never enough to change what stood beneath.

That balance had destroyed better men than most civilizations ever produced.

Abaddon had practiced it for millennia.

He bent space again.

The battlefield folded.

Demonic faces slid past him in the dark between places—horned, fanged, weeping, laughing—pressing close enough that their breath misted across his armor.

Then reality released him.

Abaddon emerged behind the Lion.

Drach'nyen was already moving.

Its edge swept toward the back of El'Jonson's neck.

Angron attacked at the same instant.

His blade came down from above with both hands behind it, less sword than executioner's block given motion. Fire streamed from its edge.

Mortarion's Silence rose from below.

The scythe dragged a cloud of bloatflies behind it, its plague-stained blade trailing strings of yellow pus and blackened blood through the air.

Three killing blows.

One descending.

One rising.

One level with the neck.

A lattice of death closing from every direction.

Against almost anything ever born, it would have produced a corpse.

Lion El'Jonson bent one knee.

That was all.

His head dipped beneath Drach'nyen with scarcely an inch to spare.

His free leg snapped outward.

The toes struck Silence on the side of the blade and knocked Mortarion's rising cut down. The scythe buried itself in the dirt, sending plague-soaked soil spraying across the arena.

At the same instant, the Emperor's Shield rose.

Angron's sword smashed into it.

The impact drove the Lion lower, boots grinding into the earth, yet the Shield turned the blow aside by inches.

Toward Abaddon.

He jerked back. The demon blade passed close enough to his helm that its heat washed across his face.

Then there was nobody between them as Lion dissolved into smoke and shadow. Green leaves swept through the space he had occupied. Cold rain flashed briefly against Abaddon's armor, absurd and clean amid the heat and filth of the arena.

El'Jonson reappeared beyond them.

Between the Astartes and Custodian lines.

Dark green armor streaked with blood.

Breastplate cracked.

One side visibly damaged beneath Angron's earlier strike.

His sword remained steady.

The Shield remained raised.

Only the slight rise and fall of his shoulders betrayed the effort.

Abaddon glared at him.

For the second time that day, he revised a private assessment.

Yes.

Yes, indeed.

Blades alone?

Six moves.

---

Guilliman drew a slow breath and forced himself upright.

His armor protested every inch.

Servos whined beneath cracked plate. Internal braces groaned against the weight of his frame. Somewhere near his left hip, a damaged actuator clicked with every shift of his stance, the sound small and mechanical beneath the distant thunder of weapons fire.

Still, the armor answered him.

The Hand of Dominion hung from his left fist as a scorched ruin. Several fingers no longer closed properly. Its power-field emitters had burned themselves dead through repeated attempts to cave Angron's skull in.

His right hand, however, once again held the Emperor's Sword.

Golden fire moved along the blade in slow, steady waves.

Its heat sank through Guilliman's gauntlet and into his arm, gentle beside the inferno it had unleashed against Abaddon. Around him, its presence seemed to push back against the terror clinging to the Imperial line.

He watched one of his sons straighten.

Another adjusted his grip on a chainsword with hands that had trembled moments earlier.

A wounded Terminator drew a deeper breath.

Even the Custodians seemed to settle into themselves, guardian spears rising fractionally as the golden light passed over their auramite.

Tiny changes.

A mortal observer might never have noticed them.

Guilliman did.

Astartes knew fear.

Anyone who claimed otherwise had simply never watched one prepare to face three monsters who had helped break the galaxy.

Guilliman stepped through the line.

As he passed one of his sons, he laid the ruined Hand of Dominion briefly against the warrior's shoulder.

The Marine gave a single nod.

That was enough.

Guilliman emerged beside his brother.

The Lion stood with the Emperor's Shield raised and Fealty held low at his side, dark green armor battered almost beyond recognition. Blood still marked the fracture in his breastplate. One pauldron hung slightly lower where Angron's tail had crushed the plate beneath it. Rainwater from whatever impossible forest followed his shadow-walking still glittered across the armor in tiny silver beads before evaporating in the arena's heat.

Guilliman planted his feet.

Both hands wrapped around the hilt of the Emperor's Sword.

Across the battlefield, the traitors waited.

Lion glanced sideways.

His eyes traveled down Guilliman's stance, then back up.

He nodded once, sharp and certain.

"Your stance has improved."

Guilliman nearly smiled.

"I have had quite a bit of practice since you went for your walk."

"More of a nap."

"Ah. So you were being lazy."

"In my defense, I was stabbed."

"So was I."

The Lion's eyes shifted toward him.

"Oh? Who?"

"Fulgrim. You?"

"Luther."

Guilliman's amusement died.

"…I'm sorry."

The Lion looked forward again.

Something old and quiet passed behind his eyes.

"We can discuss it later."

He raised Fealty.

The sword's point settled directly on Abaddon.

"For now, the First Captain is mine."

Guilliman tightened his grip on the Emperor's Sword.

"Only if I do not reach him first."

Across the ruined arena, Abaddon began walking toward them.

Drach'nyen swung lazily beside him, tracing slow circles through the dust. Black vapor crawled from its edge and vanished before reaching the ground. His armor still smoked from the Volcano Cannon's punishment, molten scars glowing dull red across the breastplate while wounded wards flickered like dying stars around him.

He walked with the confidence of a man who had already decided how the story ended.

Angron rolled his shoulders.

Then reached up and cracked his neck.

The sound carried through the sudden lull like branches breaking in a winter forest.

Samni'arius dragged behind him, its edge digging a glowing furrow through the packed earth. Fire licked from the blade. Blood steamed where it touched the ground.

Mortarion descended beside them.

His wings beat slowly, each vast stroke stirring clouds of flies and plague-smoke. He hovered several inches above the earth, robes hanging in filthy tatters beneath corroded armor. The blade of Silence glistened with thick yellow pus that stretched into strings before falling onto the soil below.

Where the droplets landed, the dirt blistered.

Abaddon surveyed the Imperial survivors.

Bodies covered the arena.

Astartes lay tangled among Custodians. Broken shields jutted from churned earth. Weapons still burned where dead hands had released them. Chapter banners hung shredded beneath the ruined arches, their colors almost lost beneath soot and blood.

"Is this all?"

Abaddon's voice rolled across the battlefield.

His eyes moved over the surviving Astartes, the wounded Custodians, the Dreadnoughts venting smoke behind them.

"Is this all the might the Lord Commander of the Imperium can call to his side?"

"Enough to ruin your theater," Guilliman answered.

He forced strength into the words.

His defiance came out threadbare.

His lungs burned. The Sword's warmth held him upright, yet his body remained stitched, cracked, bruised, and deeply offended by every decision he had made during the last four days.

It would have to do.

Abaddon gave the faintest shake of his head.

His eyes remained fixed on the two brothers.

"Theater or otherwise, you have lost."

He raised Drach'nyen.

Its point passed between Guilliman and Lion, indicating the horizon beyond them.

Guilliman looked.

An army darkened the distance.

Chaos Astartes moved in ranks through the broken structures surrounding the arena. Demonic shapes loped among them. Engines crawled behind banners marked with the eight-pointed sigil, while the ground itself seemed to discolor beneath their advance.

"Your portal is shut," Abaddon continued. "My armies will be here within two minutes." He lowered the blade. "Yield, both of you, and I will allow your sons to live."

Guilliman never discovered what Lion intended to say.

Their sons answered first.

The roar rose from behind them.

Chapter sigils lifted through the smoke.

Colors drawn from across an Imperium fractured in half, surging together around the gold of the Custodes.

Weapons rose.

Bolters thundered.

Plasma coils screamed.

Melta fire painted the air white.

The combined volley crashed toward Abaddon as the Astartes charged.

Guilliman felt his smile spread wide behind the Lion's borrowed helm.

Pride hurt almost as much as the wounds.

He welcomed it anyway.

His voice joined the roar, primal and wordless.

He surged forward with his sons.

His brother came with him.

For a handful of glorious seconds, Guilliman forgot the fractures, the poison, the calculations, the endless weight of an Imperium that always needed one more war won.

There was only the charge.

Only his sons.

Only his brother beside him.

Whatever came next, they would meet it together.

Chaos was unimpressed.

Abaddon raised his hand.

Mortarion mirrored him.

Black fire coiled around the Warmaster's fingers.

Jaundiced light gathered around the Death Lord.

The two powers twisted together for a single moment.

Then burst outward.

The Rotwind came with them.

Guilliman had endured Mortarion's aura before.

The slow poison.

The invisible decay.

The crawling sickness that entered through breath and blood and the tiniest flaw in a seal.

This was different.

This Rotwind was plague given weather.

It struck the Imperial charge like an ocean hurled sideways.

The world vanished.

Dust filled Guilliman's vision.

Warp-light flashed through the storm in diseased greens and bruised yellows. Fragments of rotted flesh spun through the gale, tiny strips of skin and clotted matter called into existence by Mortarion's presence and whipped into blinding clouds.

Banners disappeared.

Chapter sigils vanished.

Men became shadows.

The vox exploded with warnings, prayers, and screams.

Someone shouted for his squad.

Another voice began reciting a litany and vanished beneath static.

Then the wind rose again.

The gale became a hurricane.

Guilliman lowered his head.

Debris hammered his armor.

A shard of stone struck his shoulder hard enough to twist him sideways. Acidic rain hissed across the plate. Paint blistered from his forearms. Gilding peeled away in curling strips, leaving raw metal beneath.

He stepped forward.

His body screamed.

Every injury woke together.

Cracked bones ground against stitched muscle. Half-healed organs shifted painfully beneath the armor as he demanded motion from flesh that had been begging for rest since the battle began.

Another step.

The wind pushed against him with the strength of a living thing.

Golden light flickered through the storm to his right.

Lion.

His brother stood crouched behind the Emperor's Shield, both feet dug into the churned soil.

He stepped.

The Rotwind shoved him back half the distance.

He stepped again.

Then again.

Slowly, impossibly, Lion forced his way through the hurricane until he came level with Guilliman.

Rain and plague-water steamed from the Shield.

His pale hair whipped around his face, a wry grin appearing beneath narrowed eyes.

"They seem to have developed a severe case of haphephobia!"

Guilliman stared at him.

Even through the gale, he heard it clearly.

He reached across and clamped one hand around Lion's pauldron.

"Then let us cure them of it!"

Lion laughed once.

"No need!"

Guilliman leaned closer.

"What?"

"The whisper-man says our reinforcements are here!"

Guilliman had exactly enough time to once again wonder which deeply concerning individual his brother had decided to call the whisper-man.

Then the storm surged.

Guilliman braced.

The impact never came.

Golden flame filled his vision.

The Rotwind broke around it.

One instant, the gale screamed through the arena with enough force to peel armor from stone.

The next, silence descended.

Plague-clouds burned away.

Black fire vanished.

The fragments of rotted flesh became motes of ash and disappeared.

Only a soft ringing remained in Guilliman's ears. A gentle warmth settled across his face. For one heartbeat, he remembered another hand.

A cool cloth pressed against his forehead. His mother sitting beside him while fever crawled through his childhood body, her fingers brushing damp hair away from his brow.

The memory struck deeper than any weapon had managed that day.

Guilliman buried it immediately.

There would be time for ghosts later.

He raised his eyes.

Wings filled his vision.

Great, luminous wings stretched across the battlefield, ephemeral and impossibly solid at once. Light moved through them like sunrise through stained glass, each feather outlined in molten gold.

A figure hovered before him.

Hope caught in Guilliman's throat.

His heart stopped.

If one brother could return…

The thought came unbidden.

Terrible in its tenderness.

Perhaps…?

The light softened.

Reality returned.

The woman before him remained radiant.

Her wings were magnificent, but…

They lacked the vast, feathered beauty Guilliman remembered framing his brother against Macragge's cerulean skies.

Her hair was silver.

Sanguinius had been crowned in spun gold.

There was also the unavoidable matter of height.

She was approximately six feet too short.

Hope quietly folded itself away.

The woman half turned toward him.

Her wings barely moved, only the faintest flutter disturbing their radiant edges. Silver eyes glowed with a power Guilliman could sense and utterly failed to identify. Golden armor and scarlet cloth framed her, while a sword of flames burned in her right hand.

She smiled.

"Greetings, my lords."

Her voice carried strangely through the battlefield, clear and calm despite the explosions beginning again beyond her wings.

"Your father asked me to lend you all a hand."

Guilliman's eyes widened with recognition. Relief followed a heartbeat later.

"Ce—"

Lion stepped forward, gaze sharpened. "And you are…?"

Her eyebrows rose.

"Ah. Apologies."

She inclined her head.

"I am Celestine, a Living Saint of the Emperor of Mankind."

Guilliman clamped his brother's shoulder again. "I'll explain later. But she is an ally, and a welcome one."

Lion looked at him.

"If we live through this," Lion finally said, "I am going to need a drink."

"Seconded."

Then Lion raised the Emperor's Shield.

His gaze locked onto the Red Angel.

"Angron."

Guilliman stepped forward, raising the Emperor's Sword.

"Abaddon."

His vox chimed.

A tiny, cheerful jingle played inside the borrowed helm.

Guilliman froze.

He knew that vox-notification.

"Actually," Koron's voice said over the line, "would you mind teaming up with the other big guy to fight Angron?"

Guilliman closed his eyes.

Then muted his external speakers.

"Koron."

A pause.

"Where are you?"

Another.

"And why?"

---

High above the arena, Koron stood amid the smoldering remains of the ritual's power source and stared down at the Red Angel.

From here, Angron looked less like a warrior than a moving catastrophe.

Fire crawled across the brass and blood-dark plates of his armor. Each sweep of his wings stirred ash through the shattered arches below, and even at this distance Koron could feel the pressure of him through the Warp-flesh beneath his boots: rage given mass, hatred wrapped in muscle, brass, and flame.

Koron keyed the comm.

"Above you. And because—"

His left arm shifted.

Metal clicked beneath the plating as the final stages of reconstruction finished. Panels flexed apart along his forearm, exposing a nest of silver filament, black alloy, and fresh mechanical grafting still slick with coolant.

"—I need Angron distracted for this to have a chance of working."

Behind his wrist, four hydraulic arms ratcheted backward in sequence.

They hauled the long metal spike deeper into the reassembled limb.

Compressed air hissed from the joint as a metal pillar extended from the elbow.

Locking teeth engaged.

The spike seated into place with a heavy metallic thunk that Koron felt all the way through his ribs.

Green diagnostics flickered across his vision.

Below, Guilliman's voice came over the vox with the slow, careful cadence of a man who had learned through repeated experience that asking Koron a question could make the situation considerably worse.

"Koron."

Another pause as he considered his words.

"What are you trying to do now?"

Koron looked down through drifting smoke, dissolving warp-flesh, and the last dying embers of the ritual.

At Angron.

At the chains buried through flesh and armor.

At the Warp boiling around him.

At the invisible hand beyond all of it.

His fingers curled once.

The limb answered.

Koron swallowed the fear rising in his throat.

"…I'm trying to save someone."

 

[Fragment of Serenity]

Well, I applaud his balls.

Shake my head at his arrogant stupidity, but applaud the balls on him none the less.

Let's hope that trying to save a monster doesn't get Too many people killed.

 

[Talon88.1]

Well, I applaud his balls.

Shake my head at his arrogant stupidity, but applaud the balls on him none the less.

Let's hope that trying to save a monster doesn't get Too many people killed.

Click to shrink...

Honestly? Fair enough

 

[BuilderOne]

Chenkov's gun is about to fire. Looking forward to the next chapter.

And I like the deadpan humor of the Lion here.

 

[Talon88.1]

Chenkov's gun is about to fire. Looking forward to the next chapter.

And I like the deadpan humor of the Lion here.

Click to shrink...

Yup!

And thank you, Lion is a delicate line to toe between enough humor and still being terrifying

 

[Talon88.1]

Chapter Seventy-Four

---

Reminder dear listeners, the Voxbox remains open at all times!

---

Authors Note:

Okay, so this was a big chapter—both in terms of what happened and the amount of trust I am asking from you as readers.

I am very aware of the scale of what Koron has just attempted, as well as the enormous implications if it succeeds. Those consequences will matter, and the story is going to treat them accordingly.

With that in mind, I would love to hold either an AMA or an extended Voxbox answer session. If you have questions about the chapter, the mechanics involved, the characters' decisions, or the direction this may take the story, send them in. I may have to dodge anything that wanders too deeply into spoiler territory, but I will answer whatever I safely can.

---

Fire and shadow churned across the arena. Every flare of weapon-light dragged the battlefield briefly into focus: shattered flagstones glazed with blood, broken weapons half-buried beneath rubble, bodies in blue, gold, and black sprawled where they had fallen. Ash drifted beneath the ruined arches in slow gray curtains, only to whip sideways whenever another impact punched through the smoke.

Guilliman's vision had narrowed until the edges of the world seemed little more than darkness. His heartbeat thundered inside his skull, drowning out the distant roar of bolters and the screams of the dying. Sweat burned beneath the padding of the Lion's borrowed helm. Each breath rasped hot through his lungs, carrying the copper taste of blood and the bitter chemical residue of Mortarion's poisons.

The arena had ceased to exist as anything larger than the few meters surrounding Angron.

There was only the next attack.

The angle of the Red Angel's shoulders. The tightening of one clawed hand around Samni'arius. The minute shift of weight through digitigrade legs before the immense mass of a demon Primarch committed itself to motion.

Guilliman watched all of it.

He had seconds to parry, evade, answer, and begin again.

Angron's blade screamed across his left side.

Guilliman turned into the blow and caught it upon the Emperor's Sword. Golden flame burst between the weapons, washing Angron's snarling features in furnace light. Exhaustion stole the final fraction of precision from Guilliman's movement. His deflection came a hair too shallow.

Ceramite sheared apart in molten fragments as Samni'arius carved through his pauldron. One burning piece struck the side of his helm and spun away trailing sparks. Heat lashed across his cheek as the force of the strike wrenched his torso sideways and drove one boot skidding through a slurry of ash and pulverized stone.

Angron surged after him.

Gold flashed at Guilliman's side as Lion drove the Shield into the Red Angel's ribs with both the timing and merciless economy of a swordsman exploiting an opening measured in heartbeats.

The collision cracked across the arena like artillery.

Smoke flattened outward in a perfect ring as the golden light rang out. Loose rubble skipped across the floor. Guilliman felt the impact through his boots and damaged ribs as Angron lurched sideways, one cloven hoof gouging a trench through the dirt deep enough to expose blackened stones beneath.

His vast wings snapped open. The leathery membranes caught the air with a thunderous report, shedding embers and clotted blood as they arrested his momentum, allowing Angron to land upright.

Guilliman felt his jaw tighten.

Angron had learned how far Lion could throw him with it. How quickly the First could recover after committing his weight to the strike. How much ground Angron needed beneath his feet before another attack could reach him.

And the bastard kept surviving long enough to use the lessons.

The First advanced through the drifting smoke, dark green armor nearly black beneath soot and dried blood. A crack ran down the center of his breastplate, split from Mortarion's earlier blow, the fractured ceramite rising and falling faintly with each measured breath. Blood had dried in dark streaks beneath the damage, though his sword arm remained perfectly steady.

Fealty thrust toward the seam beneath Angron's brass cuirass.

The Red Angel twisted away with startling speed for something so enormous. The point scraped across corrupted armor and threw sparks from the engraved brass.

Guilliman swept the Emperor's Sword through the space Angron had abandoned a fraction later, its flames painting the underside of the demon's wings in brilliant yellow-white. Angron recoiled again.

Lion stepped with him.

Guilliman pressed from the other side.

For several precious seconds the brothers moved as one.

Lion attacked with exacting precision, each strike forcing Angron toward the opening Guilliman was already preparing to exploit. Guilliman answered with heavier blows, using the Emperor's blade to deny space and drive their brother backward through drifting smoke, shattered masonry, and pools of blood boiling beneath Angron's heat.

Step by step, they forced him away from the other battle raging across the arena.

Behind them, Drach'nyen howled.

The sound seemed to come from several directions at once, a chorus of distant murder buried beneath the shriek of metal. Celestine's sword answered with a flare of white-gold fire bright enough to cast the broken arches into stark silhouette.

Mortarion's Silence came down somewhere beyond Guilliman's sight.

The impact was wet and thunderous as something enormous broke.

Sickly green light crawled across the arena walls. Black flame climbed after it, twisting through the smoke before Celestine's radiance burned a hole through both.

Guilliman did not look.

He could not afford to.

Angron was smiling.

Enough of his human face remained beneath the horns, brass, and burning eyes to make the result worse. The grin stretched across scarred features with the exhausted delight of a creature that had finally found opponents capable of making the violence interesting.

Guilliman hated seeing his brother inside it.

He hated more that he could still recognize him.

Another breath scraped through his lungs. His body shuddered beneath the armor. Even a Primarch possessed limits, and Guilliman had passed his own several minutes ago.

The Armor of Fate groaned around him with every movement. Cracks webbed across the breastplate. Several internal servos responded sluggishly, compensating for damaged actuators and limbs whose strength was rapidly becoming theoretical as the freshly detoxified muscles trembled beneath the plate.

The Emperor's Sword had burned Mortarion's corruption from his blood, yet it had granted no reprieve to the flesh underneath. Half-knitted wounds pulled whenever he turned. Reinforced ribs ground against damaged muscle. Organs Calliade had spent hours repairing now protested each violent twist of his torso with deep, nauseating pain.

His left arm had gone numb from shoulder to fingertips.

His legs somehow felt weightless and impossibly heavy at once.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Guilliman could already hear Calliade composing the lecture.

Assuming, of course, Guilliman survived long enough to receive it.

Across from him, Angron lowered Samni'arius.

Fire crawled lazily along the blade.

His chest rose beneath brass and blood-dark flesh, each breath leaving his mouth in coils of smoke. One wing flexed behind him, the torn membrane glowing faintly where the Sword had passed too close.

The smile remained.

Guilliman straightened as far as his ruined body allowed.

Both hands tightened around the hilt as golden flame rolled down the blade.

Beside him, Lion raised Fealty once more.

Angron leaned forward.

And Guilliman knew, with the exhausted certainty of a man who had already exceeded every sensible limit placed upon him, that his brother was about to come again.

Ding-dong!

The cheerful little chime rang inside Guilliman's borrowed helm.

"What?" he gasped, refusing to waste another breath on the question.

"Immobilize him, and if you can, expose his neck. I only need him stationary for two seconds. Can you give me that?" Koron asked, his voice carrying through the vox from somewhere high above the arena.

Guilliman kept his eyes on Angron.

The Red Angel stood amid the smoke with infuriating calm.

Guilliman had spent everything he possessed simply remaining alive against his brother. Every exchange had demanded strength his body no longer had, precision from muscles trembling beneath damaged plate, and attention dragged through exhaustion so deep that the edges of his vision had begun to pulse with darkness.

Koron wanted Angron held still.

For two seconds.

Guilliman drew another ragged breath.

"Ask my brother."

A flicker of thought opened the channel between their vox systems, and Koron's voice carried across it.

Lion's head turned slightly.

Without his helm, the damage was easier to see.

His pale hair clung damply to his face and neck, darkened in places by sweat and blood. Ash had settled along one cheek and caught in the strands above his brow. A thin line of crimson ran from somewhere beneath his hairline, followed the curve of his jaw, and disappeared beneath the gorget of his battered armor.

Celestine's arrival had driven back the worst of Mortarion's vapors, and some color had returned beneath Lion's skin.

Some.

His face remained tightly drawn. Each breath lifted his fractured breastplate with deliberate care, shallow enough to spare damaged ribs and whatever lay beneath them. One shoulder sat fractionally lower than the other where Angron's earlier strike had crushed the plate, though neither his sword nor the Emperor's Shield trembled in his hands.

His brow furrowed as the unfamiliar voice reached him.

Green eyes shifted toward Guilliman. The question passed between them without a word.

"You can trust him," Guilliman said.

Lion studied him for half a heartbeat.

Then nodded once, his attention returned to Angron.

For several seconds, the First Primarch said nothing.

The battlefield seemed to recede around him as a familiar look settled across his brother's features.

He had seen it across strategy tables, during campaigns, and in the moments before Lion committed himself to violence.

Somewhere behind his brother's eyes, the fight had already begun, several moves ahead while Angron still stood smiling in the smoke.

Lion adjusted his grip on Fealty.

"I can."

His eyes narrowed.

"ETA?"

Koron answered over the private channel.

Lion listened.

"…Understood."

He raised the Shield.

Gold caught the surrounding firelight as the relic settled before him, the scarred surface angled toward the Red Angel. Fealty lowered beside it, its point hovering only inches above the rubble-strewn ground.

Lion shifted one foot backward.

Across the arena, Angron's smile widened.

"On your mark."

---

High above the battlefield, Koron watched six titans tear into one another.

From eight hundred feet up, even Primarchs should have looked small.

They did not.

Angron remained an enormous red wound moving through the smoke below, every sweep of Samni'arius leaving an incandescent arc behind it. Guilliman and Lion circled him in flashes of blue, green, and gold, their movements too fast and too violent for anything so massive. Each collision reached Koron a heartbeat late as a distant concussion, shuddering through the dying Warp-flesh beneath his boots.

They moved with the terrifying economy of warriors who had apparently spent several centuries discovering exactly how much violence could be packed into half a second.

It was working.

Barely.

The scary part?

Angron was matching them.

On the far side of the arena, the angel woman fought according to an entirely different collection of rules.

Koron still had no idea what she actually was.

Human, probably. Wings aside.

One moment they curved around her in overlapping layers, luminous feathers locking together as Drach'nyen crashed against them. The impact rang across the arena like a cathedral bell struck hard enough to crack, black fire crawling between white-gold pinions before being burned away.

The next moment, those same wings narrowed as feathers became edges, and light sharpened into geometry.

She twisted through the air and swept one wing across Abaddon's guard. Radiant feathers carved glowing tracks through the darkness surrounding him, forcing the Warmaster backward as several of his wards flared in succession.

Mortarion came for her from above.

Silence tore down through a bank of plague-smoke, its diseased blade trailing flies and strings of blackened fluid.

She beat her wings once.

The motion launched her backward with such abrupt acceleration that the scythe passed beneath her boots and buried itself in the shattered arena floor. Stone erupted around Mortarion's feet. Diseased vapor rolled outward in a green-black wave.

The angel-woman answered with white-gold flame that poured from her open hand.

For an instant the entire far side of the arena vanished into radiance. Color washed away. The broken arches became black silhouettes against a field of white. Mortarion slid backward several inches, one armored foot plowing a furrow through the stone while his wings spread against the force.

Abaddon surrendered less ground. His black wards swelled around him in overlapping shells, the fire breaking across them in sheets that scattered burning fragments into the surrounding smoke.

She had hurt them, but not for free.

The grimace across her face vanished almost immediately, yet Koron caught it. So did the tremor running through her sword arm when she drew it back. Her wings flexed once too sharply, the motion more correction than flourish.

Whatever she was, she could stand in that arena. She could hurt things that should have been impossible to hurt.

She was still fighting well outside her weight class.

Mortarion disappeared.

One instant he was there. The next, his silhouette dissolved into the plague-smoke surrounding him.

Koron's predictive model screamed. A red warning flashed across his vision before conscious thought caught up.

Behind her.

Silence emerged from the haze.

The scythe descended toward the center of her back.

She vanished in a detonation of light.

Mortarion's weapon cut through the flare and shifted sideways by the smallest fraction, enough to carry the blade harmlessly past empty air. The Death Lord recoiled, one gauntleted hand rising across the lenses of his helm as the brilliance burned through the diseased fog around him.

The angel reappeared upside down above his shoulders.

Both wings folded toward him, and for a second, they ceased resembling wings entirely. Each narrowed into a long spear of condensed white-gold radiance aimed directly at Mortarion's shoulders.

Abaddon saw it too.

The Talon of Horus snapped outward. Black fire erupted from his palm.

The blast struck her across one wing, causing her body to fold around the impact. A muffled cry escaped her as she spun sideways through the air, silver hair whipping across her face. She twisted before gravity could claim her and opened her uninjured wing hard enough to arrest the tumble.

Several luminous feathers along the other had curled inward. White-gold brilliance guttered into smoking black along their edges.

Koron's stomach tightened.

'Sasha, we are out of time.'

He hurled the thought down their mental link alongside the data flooding every layer of his vision.

All six cognitive threads were already running.

One tracked Angron.

Another modeled Guilliman and Lion's movements.

A third monitored the angel, Mortarion, and Abaddon in case their battle intersected the drop zone.

The remaining threads chewed through energy curves, projected material deformation, Warp-density fluctuations, demonic resonance estimates from the Khorne rituals, the Nail architecture stored from the spire, and several branches of mathematics Koron strongly suspected had begun quietly regretting their involvement.

None of them were converging fast enough.

'I know!' Sasha shouted back. Inside Koron's mindscape, her golden sphere bounced frantically between suspended equations. Probability trees unfolded around her in luminous branches, split, collapsed, and vanished before three more replaced them.

One model flashed red.

Another followed.

Then another.

'We're only at fifty-four percent confidence!'

Sasha slammed one failed projection aside hard enough to scatter its equations into golden fragments.

'There's too much we don't know. The Khorne wavefunction dataset is mostly extrapolation, and the data we have on the Nails was never meant for Primarch physiology, let alone a Primarch who has spent ten thousand years as a demon!'

Another projection died.

Sasha caught its remains, tore three usable variables free, and threw them into the next simulation.

'We're stacking assumptions on assumptions!'

Koron watched another cascade of probability branches terminate in unpleasant shades of crimson.

'Assumptions on assumptions, built on top of a dimensional reality that apparently runs on narrative logic.'

Sasha's sphere stopped for half a heartbeat.

'The bullshit of the Warp is not helping!'

Despite everything, Koron almost laughed.

'I know. But I've always loved writing stories.'

'Loving stories won't help much if this one ends with Angron turning you into decorative paste.'

'Fair.'

Numbers continued crawling across his vision.

Koron watched them. Watched Angron. Watched another probability tree split into failure after failure.

Then he exhaled.

'Let's try to write one more anyway.'

For once, Sasha had no immediate answer.

Koron lowered his gaze toward his left arm and the spike that protruded just above his wrist.

It was deliberately ugly.

No polished casing. No elegant Golden Age lines. A reinforced metal shaft sat locked above the forearm plating, surrounded by four hydraulic arms and a compact pressure piston designed to drive the spike forward with vastly more force than anything that size had a reasonable right to produce.

Rael's words returned to him.

Simple weapons carried weight.

Humanity had spent tens of thousands of years killing with swords, spears, axes, clubs, and knives. Generation after generation had wrapped meaning around the shapes.

A sword severed. A hammer crushed. A knife found the heart.

And a spear?

A spear pierced the hide of something larger than the person holding it.

The hunter's weapon.

The monster-killer.

Against creatures born from symbolism, belief, memory, and metaphor, that history mattered. If Koron wanted to punch through the hide of a demon Primarch, a spear was as good a story as any.

He closed his eyes, if only for an instant.

The roar below dulled behind his eyelids.

His heartbeat did not.

Koron opened them again.

Half a second had passed during his conversation with Sasha.

'Are the nanites for the Nail-value control system ready?'

'Ready.'

Her voice had lost some of its frantic edge, her focus pushing it aside.

'My probe from the spire didn't show any abnormalities in the underlying control architecture for the Nails. Assuming it hasn't fundamentally rewritten itself since then, the inversion package should propagate.'

Koron disliked several words in that sentence. Assuming ranked particularly high.

'Skullcap construction nanites?'

More figures moved across his vision.

'Also ready. I'm going to keep updating the anti-Khorne frequency until the very last second. The Gellar field projectors should give five minutes of operation if the load remains below roughly ten times our calculated demonic-energy threshold.'

'And above that?'

'Then we learn something new. Also likely we die. Horrifically. But quickly.'

Koron flexed his reformatted hand.

Metal tendons tightened beneath the smooth plating. The arm still felt subtly wrong, the extra mass forcing him to lean against it.

The spike remained locked above his wrist.

'Well… shall we?'

Sasha's golden sphere stopped moving.

'No.'

Koron blinked.

'We really, really should not.'

Then the sphere bobbed once.

'But fuck it.'

Koron smiled despite himself. Some of the pressure in his chest loosened.

'Thank you, Sasha.'

'If this works, I get co-author credit.'

'Deal.'

Koron pushed himself upright, the platform shifting beneath his boots.

What remained of the ritual structure had begun to die around him. Once-slick Warp-flesh had turned gray and brittle, sloughing away from exposed ribs and pillars of bone. Greasy ash drifted upward instead of down in places, caught in pockets of failing unreality.

Koron shook out his arms, then his legs. He rolled his shoulders once and bounced lightly on the balls of his feet, trying to convince his muscles that this was simply another jump.

'Gravity-plate timer?'

Sasha threw a graph into the corner of his HUD.

Projected trajectories branched away from the tiny representation of Koron in a fan of possibilities.

Approximately half ended in red. One projected version of himself dropped cleanly, hit the gravitic deceleration field, slowed, and landed hard enough to roll but remain recognizably human.

'Set,' Sasha said, then continued with considerably less enthusiasm: 'We still don't know which way you'll be oriented when they fire. The plates might catch you and save you from the, again, eight-hundred-foot fall.'

The surviving projection flashed green.

Three others went dark red.

'Or they might make you hit harder.'

Koron eyeballed the probabilities.

'It is a survivable fall.'

'Survivable and enjoyable belong in very different categories.'

Another model appeared where the projection tried to stand beside Angron.

'And surviving the impact won't help much if you're lying there unable to move next to Angron.'

Koron looked down.

The Red Angel burned beneath him.

A monster built around the remains of a man.

'Not if this works.'

Sasha went quiet for a long second.

'The "if" in that sentence could give Atlas a day off.'

Koron shrugged.

'…Fair.'

He stepped toward the edge. Half-dissolved bones crunched under his weight and sank into gray tissue that immediately began collapsing into greasy ash around the sole. The air beyond the ledge shimmered with heat rising from the battlefield, eight hundred feet below.

Smoke drifted through the gulf in ragged sheets.

Black fire crawled across the far side of the arena while the angel burned against it like a fallen star refusing to go out.

Angron stood at the center of Koron's vision. A targeting reticle settled across the exposed line of his neck.

Koron drew one slow breath, pushing down the sensation of his lungs feeling too small. He let it out through his teeth as his helm sealed around his head.

"One for the money—"

Safeties along his reformatted arm peeled backward with a series of metallic clicks. The assembly unlocked. Hydraulics pressurized.

The spike remained seated, poised to deploy in less than a heartbeat.

"Two for the show—"

Koron bent his knees.

His center of gravity dropped. One hand brushed the yielding Warp-flesh beneath him for balance. It was warm.

Gross.

"Three to get ready…"

He leaned forward. Weight shifted beyond the point his legs could recover.

For a strange instant, Koron balanced between standing and falling.

Eight hundred feet of smoke, fire, and bad ideas waited beneath him.

He arched his neck, locking his eyes on the distant red shape below.

"Four to go!"

Koron uncoiled.

Both legs drove against the platform.

Bone shattered beneath his boots. A slab of dissolving flesh tore loose and spun after him as he hurled himself down into open air.

Wind struck him instantly.

His stomach tried to remain behind.

Tucking his limbs, Koron became a missile made of engineering, panic, and potentially catastrophic ideas.

"Mark!"

---

Guilliman saw Koron's descent register across his display.

A targeting rune appeared high above the arena, impossibly small against the broken arches and smoke-choked sky. It began falling.

A timer ignited in the upper corner of his borrowed helm.

Six seconds.

Koron's voice came over the vox.

"Mark!"

The brothers charged without a word.

Angron came eagerly to meet them.

The Red Angel's grin widened as Samni'arius rose in both hands. Fire streamed along the demon blade, spilling from its edge in twisting banners that painted the blood-slick stone beneath him crimson. His wings spread wide behind his shoulders, vast leathery membranes catching the furnace glow until Angron seemed to fill half the ruined arena with brass, shadow, and blood-light.

His cloven hooves struck the ground hard enough to crack stone.

Five seconds.

Neither brother slowed. There had been no command between them. No explanation. No rehearsed signal.

Guilliman simply knew what his brother needed.

His fingers opened, and the Emperor's Sword left his hand.

Golden fire wheeled through the smoke as the weapon spun hilt-first across the space between them.

Lion released the Emperor's Shield at the same instant.

Guilliman caught it without breaking stride.

The relic slammed into his gauntleted hand with enough weight to drag his wounded shoulder down for half a step. Ancient gold filled his right side, its scarred surface reflecting Angron's approaching fire.

Beside him, Lion moved with the same seamless certainty.

Fealty rolled beneath his wrist and dropped into his left hand. His right snapped upward.

Lion's fingers closed around the Sword's hilt.

Golden flame surged up the blade before the exchange had even finished, washing across his battered green armor and illuminating the blood streaking his face.

He made the weapon swap look as though he had practiced it ten thousand times.

Angron's grin faltered.

Four seconds.

Samni'arius twisted between his hands as he pivoted upon one cloven hoof. The motion dragged his mountainous bulk around with horrifying speed, brass armor shrieking at the joints as muscle and demon-flesh committed themselves behind the blow.

One vast wing swept low across the arena, sending a shower of mud and dirt exploding upward. Ash, pulverized stone, broken teeth, fragments of armor, and clotted blood became a blinding wall racing toward the brothers.

Angron's barbed tail came through it at knee height.

Behind both distractions followed Samni'arius.

The demon blade burned through the obscuring cloud in a screaming arc hard enough to bisect a battle tank.

Three seconds.

Guilliman planted his feet.

The tail struck the Emperor's Shield.

A clear, bell-like note cut through the roar of battle as the force drove through Guilliman's arms and into his chest. His damaged shoulder screamed. Cracked ribs shifted beneath the Armor of Fate. One boot slid backward through blood and shattered stone before finding purchase.

Gold flashed across the Shield's surface.

Guilliman braced for the tremendous answering shockwave he had watched Lion unleash again and again.

It never came.

For one absurd fraction of a second, Guilliman wondered whether the ancient relic understood what they were attempting.

Guilliman had no time to wonder further.

Lion was already beneath the blade.

He dropped from a full sprint onto one armored knee. Green ceramite struck stone hard enough to shower sparks as his momentum carried him forward. His pale hair streamed behind him, silver-white beneath the firelight, while his torso twisted into a violent spin.

Fealty reversed in his left hand.

The Emperor's Sword came around in his right.

The first rotation opened both of Angron's calves.

Golden fire and dark blood erupted together.

The Emperor's blade cut through brass, demon-flesh, and corded muscle on one side while Fealty tore through the other. Angron roared and lurched, his legs beginning to fold beneath him.

Lion kept turning.

Fealty carved back through Angron's left leg.

The Emperor's Sword crossed the right a second time.

Blood struck the arena in steaming sheets. Fire hissed across it. Severed brass plates spun away glowing at the edges as Lion completed the rotation and emerged beneath Angron's reach, both blades extended behind him.

The Red Angel's legs buckled.

Angron barely had time to lift his head.

Guilliman was already there.

Both hands gripped the rim of the fully extended Emperor's Shield. His numb left arm trembled beneath the weight. His right shoulder burned. Every damaged muscle across his chest and back screamed as he raised the relic high above his head.

Guilliman looked down into his brother's burning eyes.

Two seconds.

Then he brought the Shield down atop Angron's skull.

The report rolled through the arena like a siege gun firing inside a cathedral.

Dust leapt from the ground. Fractures raced outward beneath Angron's knees in branching black lines. His wings collapsed forward from the impact as his head was driven down, the immense weight of Guilliman's blow folding him toward the shattered stone.

Guilliman's arms nearly gave out with it.

One second.

And through that single stolen moment, Koron fell like thunder.

Guilliman caught only a pale blue shape descending through the smoke.

Then Koron hit.

The impact was pitifully small compared with the blows the Primarchs had traded. A mortal body striking a mountain.

Yet Koron had aimed well.

He struck Angron's shoulders, chest slamming against the thick muscle at the base of the demon Primarch's neck. His left forearm drove down hard against scarred flesh.

Koron's null-field hit something deeper.

The impossible flesh beneath the spearhead lost something.

Its shifting, half-symbolic substance became suddenly, brutally physical. Muscle became muscle. Skin remembered that it could tear. Blood remembered gravity.

Four hydraulic arms snapped forward simultaneously. Compressed air erupted from the housing with a cannon-crack, blasting ash and droplets of blood away from the point of impact as the piston dumped every reserve of pressure behind the spike.

Metal met demon-flesh.

For an instant, the spike stopped.

The shaft bowed.

Hydraulics screamed.

The spike punched through.

Black-red blood burst around Koron's wrist.

The metal shaft buried itself deep into Angron's neck.

For the smallest fraction of a second, Koron seemed to hang there.

Then gravity changed its mind.

His body snapped sideways and upward with impossible violence.

Something unseen caught him.

Guilliman saw Koron's torso wrench away from Angron, saw his legs wave above him, saw the mortal's body accelerate across the arena as though some gigantic invisible hand had hooked beneath his armor and hurled him aside.

Guilliman reached for him on instinct, fingers spread. His damaged arm answered a fraction too slowly.

Koron passed beyond his grasp. He struck the arena floor shoulder-first.

The impact bounced him several feet into the air.

Then he came down again.

Armor screamed across stone as Koron tumbled through the debris field, throwing sparks with every rotation. One shoulder struck a corpse hard enough to spin the body aside. His heel clipped a slab of shattered masonry and sent him tumbling again.

Then the arena wall arrived.

Koron hit it hard enough to crack the dying structure.

Fading Warp-flesh split outward from the impact in branching fissures. Diseased bone snapped. Gray tissue peeled away from exposed ribs as whole sections of the ruined wall collapsed around him, hiding him beneath the falling mass.

Guilliman took half a step toward him.

Movement beneath the Shield dragged his attention back.

Angron snarled.

One enormous hand reached behind his neck. His claws found the spike. Thick fingers closed around it, and with a wet tearing sound Angron ripped the metal free.

The object looked absurd in Angron's hand.

It was barely a foot long. Far too short to inflict any meaningful wound upon something of Angron's size. No power field crackled around its edge. None of the strange spatial distortion Guilliman remembered surrounding Koron's fingers when he had used that impossible shear to retrieve Venn's gene-seed.

Angron hurled it aside, the spike spinning end over end through the smoky air.

Guilliman's eyes followed it.

Understanding arrived with an unpleasant familiarity.

He had made this mistake before.

In the spire, he had seen the field surrounding Koron's hand and asked what kind of weapon it was.

Koron had corrected him.

It had never been a weapon.

The spike struck the stone and bounced.

Guilliman saw the hollow channel running through its center.

The sharpened metal. The pistons. The enormous force required to punch through demon flesh. All of it had disguised something almost insultingly mundane.

An industrial hypodermic needle lay upon the arena floor.

"GET BACK!"

Koron's voice exploded across the vox.

On the far side of the arena, the collapsed wall moved, a slab of diseased bone rolled aside.

Koron dragged himself out from beneath it.

One armored shoulder forced through the mass while his reformatted arm clawed for purchase against the ground. Gray Warp-flesh sagged around him in rotting curtains.

Something embedded in the wall twitched.

A vaguely human face pushed itself free from the tissue beside Koron's shoulder. Its jaw stretched too wide, rotten teeth unfolding from black gums before it lunged and clamped onto his metal bicep.

Koron gave it a glare before punching it with his free hand. The face burst apart in a spray of black fluid, fragments of teeth, and pulped meat.

"GET AWAY FROM HIM, NOW!"

The urgency in his voice erased every question.

Lion appeared beside Guilliman, Fealty already sheathed. His brother's hand closed around Guilliman's forearm with enough force to bruise even Primarch flesh.

Then the arena vanished, and Guilliman smelled pine. Cold rain touched his face.

The change was so complete that his exhausted mind almost refused it.

Wet earth compressed beneath his boots. Ancient trees rose around them, their trunks disappearing into silver mist. Water whispered through leaves overhead, cool and clean against Guilliman's overheated skin.

Then the forest released them.

Heat closed around him again.

Guilliman staggered once and found himself beside Lion directly before the shattered wall. Koron remained half-buried beneath its remains, one knee beneath him as he fought to rise.

Behind them came a roar.

The Red Angel tore across the arena with his wings spread wide, every stride pulverizing stone beneath his hooves. Murder burned behind his eyes. Blood streamed between the fingers clawing at the wound in his neck, splashing across his breastplate and spattering the ground behind him.

Samni'arius burned in his other hand.

Guilliman and Lion turned together, exchanging the Emperor's relics once more without a word.

Angron made it eight steps before he came to a stop.

One hoof struck the ground and dragged forward, carving a deep furrow through the stone as his momentum collapsed beneath him. His wings remained half-spread behind his shoulders, rigid membranes trembling against the hot air.

The fury vanished from his face.

Samni'arius slipped from his fingers.

The demon blade struck the arena floor with a heavy clang.

Slowly, almost uncertainly, both hands lifted toward his skull.

His claws pressed against the scarred flesh surrounding the Nails.

His breathing deepened. Each breath dragged harder through his immense chest, becoming louder in the sudden space where the violence had been.

His eyes widened.

Guilliman had seen every expression rage could carve into Angron's face.

Bloodlust so complete that thought itself seemed to burn away beneath it.

He remembered the brother who had screamed at the Emperor.

The berserker who had butchered worlds.

The demon that had hunted him through the arena.

Guilliman had never seen Angron confused.

The expression made him look younger.

For a terrible instant, beneath the horns and brass and scar tissue, Guilliman could almost see the man his brother had been.

Angron's claws dug deeper into his scalp.

His lips parted.

When he spoke, the voice that emerged was scarcely more than breath.

Perhaps the quietest words Guilliman had heard from his brother in ten thousand years.

"What did you do?"

Ash drifted through the smoke.

Samni'arius burned unattended upon the ground.

Somewhere in the distance, weapons continued to roar, yet the sound seemed impossibly far away.

Then something inside Angron changed.

His face twisted.

His spine arched.

Every muscle across his enormous body locked at once.

And Angron screamed.

---

Pain.

Angron knew pain.

He knew every version of it that flesh could produce and several that flesh had never been intended to survive. He knew the bite of blades, the crush of broken bone, the white fire of severed nerves and the endless red drilling of the Nails.

This was wrong.

The Nails screamed through his skull as rage surged through him, every buried filament suddenly pouring agony into nerves that had spent ten thousand years being rewarded for precisely that emotion.

Angron reached for fury on instinct.

The pain became unbearable.

He reached for violence.

The Nails pounded louder.

He reached for hate, the oldest one, the strongest one he had ever carried.

The pain nearly made him black out.

His vision went black at the edges.

Wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong—!

Angron clawed at his skull, claws carving into his own flesh.

The Nails were wrong!

---

Guilliman watched in stunned silence as Angron writhed across the shattered arena floor.

The Red Angel's claws raked through stone as his body convulsed, tearing furrows deep enough to expose the dark earth beneath. His wings beat without rhythm, vast membranes striking rubble and throwing splinters of bone and broken masonry through the smoke. Each scream rolled through the ruined arches and came back distorted by echoes.

The fury had gone out of them.

What remained was naked agony.

For nearly ten thousand years, Guilliman had kept Angron in a carefully defined place within his mind.

Traitor.

Monster.

He had read the reports of worlds drowned beneath the advance of the World Eaters. He had studied casualty rolls measured in populations rather than regiments. He remembered his own sons broken beneath Angron's hands and entire campaigns reduced to little more than lists of places where his brother had passed and humanity had ceased to exist.

Whatever brotherhood had once connected them had been buried beneath ten millennia of blood.

Guilliman had accepted that grave long ago.

Angron screamed again.

Yet…something much older than reason recoiled inside him at the cry.

It was small, instinctive, painfully human beneath everything time, war, and the Emperor had made of him.

His brother was hurting.

Guilliman turned on Koron.

The realization sharpened his voice into something harsher than command.

"What did you do?"

"Short and ugly?" Koron asked.

He had dragged himself mostly free of the collapsed wall, though one knee remained planted among broken ribs of Warp-flesh. Dust and black fluid streaked his armor.

"I inverted the Nails aggression-response values."

Lion half-turned toward him.

For a man who could watch armies die without allowing his expression to move, the slight widening of his green eyes bordered on astonishment.

"…You made rage into pain."

"Yes, rage and violent intent now trigger pain. Anything outside that loop reduces it." Koron replied, grunting as something under his armor gave an audible pop. "And I strongly suggest we all take several steps back."

Guilliman drew breath.

The air grew warm.

At first he thought Celestine had moved closer. Then her hands clamped around his arm and Lion's, forcing Guilliman to look toward her.

The Saint had gone white.

Her silver eyes were fixed on the sky above Angron.

"GET DOWN!"

The world became blood.

Crimson clouds boiled into existence above the arena with impossible speed, swallowing the broken sky between one heartbeat and the next. Their undersides churned like muscle beneath skin, lit from within by scarlet lightning.

Then the rain came.

Blood hammered down in sheets.

It struck Guilliman's armor with the force of hail, running immediately into every seam and fracture until blue ceramite gleamed wet and red. Within seconds the shattered floor had become a slick mirror of diluted gore, every footprint filling almost as quickly as it formed.

Thunder cracked overhead as scarlet lightning tore across the clouds.

Around Angron, the air began to scream.

The first gust struck hard enough to stagger Guilliman.

Lion braced beside him, one armored boot sliding through the blood before the Emperor's Shield slammed down against the stone and gave him purchase. Celestine's wings snapped outward around all of them, luminous feathers bending beneath the force as the gale clawed at her silver hair and scarlet cloth.

The wind folded inward.

Blood lifted from the ground.

Then bones.

Then weapons.

A shattered bolter rose spinning into the air. Broken swords followed it. Helmets, limbs, slabs of masonry, and loose chunks of Warp-flesh joined the growing spiral around Angron.

The vortex tightened with every heartbeat.

Skulls manifested, only to be sent tumbling through the air, mouths opening and closing as they spun. Ribbons of blood stretched upward in twisting ropes, drawn toward the crimson heavens. Fragments of bone struck one another hard enough to powder themselves, filling the storm with white dust that turned pink almost instantly.

Angron remained at its heart.

Barely visible.

Still screaming.

The arena began to come apart around him.

One of the surviving arches groaned as the storm pulled against it. Cracks raced through diseased bone and stone. The entire structure bowed inward before ripping free with a shriek, vanishing into the vortex in pieces large enough to crush tanks.

More followed.

Warp-flesh peeled from the walls in wet slabs.

Bodies lifted from the ground.

Weapons spun skyward.

Great chunks of earth tore loose around Guilliman's feet and disappeared into the roaring column.

Within seconds, the storm had become a towering pillar of blood, bone, and shattered battlefield stretching from Angron's writhing body into the crimson clouds overhead.

Celestine lunged through the gale and seized the front of Koron's armor. Her wings fought furiously for balance behind her. Blood streamed across her face, soaking silver hair against her cheeks and running from the curve of her jaw. For the first time since her arrival, Guilliman saw genuine alarm strip away the calm certainty she had carried into the arena.

Her glowing eyes locked onto Koron.

"What in the Emperor's name did you do?!"

"I can't tell you more! Not with them listening!"

Celestine's grip tightened around the front of Koron's armor.

"You speak of the Dark Gods?!"

"Obviously!"

Koron jabbed one armored finger toward the sky.

Scarlet lightning split the crimson clouds above them, illuminating the arena in a brief wash of red. Another sheet of blood followed, hammering against armor and stone hard enough to sting through exposed seams. It ran from the broken arches in thick streams and filled every crack in the shattered floor.

"And from the looks of that, it worked!"

Guilliman looked back toward the towering vortex. A skull whipped past his head and struck Lion's pauldron hard enough to burst apart. Fragments of yellowed bone vanished immediately into the gale, joining the debris spiraling around Angron.

"You believe they are listening and will interfere if they understand your plan?!" Guilliman shouted.

The wind had risen to a constant howl around them, swallowing anything quieter than a battlefield roar.

"Yes!"

"Then what can you tell us?! Quickly!"

"There are still parts I cannot talk about, not yet! But we have—"

His head tilted upward a hair, studying whatever was being shown on his HUD. Blood streamed down his helm, gathering beneath his jaw before being ripped sideways by the wind.

"Roughly four minutes to save your brother!"

Guilliman looked toward Lion.

His brother met his gaze through the storm. Blood ran in thin lines across his pale face, mixing with rainwater and ash caught in his hair. Neither spoke. The questions were already there between them.

Celestine's expression suggested that several of her preferred methods currently involved kicking Koron until useful answers emerged.

"There is nothing left to save!" Guilliman shouted.

A slab of stone the size of a man came tumbling through the gale and struck him squarely between the shoulders.

The impact drove him forward a step.

Guilliman planted one boot in the blood-slick earth, steadied himself, and continued with the offended dignity of a statesman whose speech had been interrupted by masonry.

"He is gone! Ten thousand years, Koron! His soul surrendered to a god of Chaos!"

"You're wrong!"

Koron pointed toward the hurricane.

Angron was almost invisible within it now. Only intermittent flashes of burning brass and the outline of vast wings could be seen through the spinning walls of blood and bone.

"He's still in there! I saw it! Khorne layered himself over the Nails, and the Nails over Angron! He's buried under all of it, but he's still there!"

Celestine released him, her gaze snapping toward the vortex.

Silver light flooded her eyes.

The change was immediate. The warmth and humanity in her expression vanished beneath something distant and luminous as her sight reached beyond the material world. Her wings spread behind her, broad and radiant, their edges trembling beneath the gale as she braced herself against the blood-slick ground.

A femur spun through the storm and struck her pauldron.

Sparks flashed from the gold.

Celestine did not blink.

For several seconds she simply stared.

Then every muscle in her body went rigid.

"Emperor's blood."

Guilliman turned toward her.

Celestine stepped toward the storm. Her boots slid several inches through the blood before the wings behind her flared wider and caught her balance.

"I can see something!"

Scarlet lightning tore across the heavens. The flash lit her face from below, silver eyes blazing against skin gone suddenly pale.

"It's faint! Buried deep, but there are cracks in the walls!"

Her gaze tracked something Guilliman could neither see nor feel.

Something inside the storm.

Something inside Angron.

"There is a human soul in there!"

"See?!" Koron shouted.

Another gust hit him, forcing a grappling line to be fired from his wrist. The anchor disappeared into the torn earth with a metallic crack. The cable snapped taut an instant later, holding Koron as the gale tried to drag him toward the vortex.

"You have to go get him! It's your only chance!"

The storm surged.

Guilliman drove the Sword point-first into the ground.

Golden fire hissed as the blade sank into blood-soaked stone. He wrapped both hands around the hilt and leaned against it while the wind dragged at his armor.

Even his Primarch mass was beginning to move.

His boots ground backward inch by inch, carving trenches through gore, dirt, and shattered fragments of the arena.

"Me? Koron, if anyone should be wading into a Bloodstorm, it's the Blank!"

Koron leaned hard against the grappling line. His body angled nearly forty-five degrees into the gale, boots skidding beneath him as the cable hummed under the strain.

"It can't be me!"

"Why the hell not?!"

"Because it's not my story!"

Guilliman stared at him through the sheets of crimson rain. Blood ran across the lenses of his borrowed helm faster than the autosenses could clear it.

"…Koron, the Warp is not a novel!"

"But it responds to stories!"

Koron stabbed a hand toward the storm. The movement nearly cost him his footing. One boot slipped from beneath him before he caught the grappling line with both hands and hauled himself upright again.

"Symbols! Meanings! Metaphors! Thoughts, dreams, nightmares! Belief has weight in the Warp, and stories give belief shape!"

Scarlet lightning ripped across the sky behind him.

For an instant Koron became a dark silhouette against the red light, one thin mortal anchored by a cable while the impossible storm tried to tear the entire arena apart around him.

He pointed toward Angron.

"And right now, we're going to use that against these fuckers!"

"Emperor damn it, Koron, that still doesn't mean you cannot go—!"

"It's not my story!"

Koron's shout cut through the storm.

"I'm the Trickster! I find the path nobody else sees! I make the option that shouldn't exist real!"

Another gust struck him broadside. His boots tore twin trenches through the blood-soaked earth before the grappling line snapped taut and arrested him hard enough to wrench his shoulders backward.

Koron grunted, then raised one armored foot and pointed it toward the roaring column around Angron, both hands occupied with keeping himself attached to the planet.

"But this?!"

His boot jerked toward the storm.

"This is your story! Your family's story!"

Something tightened around Guilliman's hearts.

He hated the words.

He hated how easily they reached places ten thousand years of war had failed to cauterize.

Beyond Koron, Angron screamed again.

The sound carried through the vortex beneath the thunder, ragged and almost lost beneath the roaring blood.

Koron's voice rose with it.

"You're the Hero! You're the one who steps into hell!"

The wind screamed around him.

"You're the one who reaches out his hand and gives his damned brother the one thing he has never had!"

Koron dragged in a breath.

His chest heaved beneath the armor. The grappling cable trembled in his fists. Blood streamed across his helm and poured from every plate.

Then he bellowed the final words into the storm.

"A choice!"

---

Abaddon had seen the shapes of Gods many times.

He had communed with them, argued with them, cursed them to their faces, and hammered their so-called offerings into bargains that had sustained the Long War for ten thousand years. He knew the impressions they left upon the Warp, the masks infinity assumed when it wished to make itself comprehensible to something as small as a mortal mind.

Nurgle's swollen smile was always patient, almost affectionate. It carried the certainty of something that believed every road, however long or winding, eventually ended in its garden.

Tzeentch watched through countless eyes. Slit pupils glittered with private amusement, forever pretending Abaddon's next words had been known before he chose to speak them.

Slaanesh came as reaching hands and whispered promises, fingertips brushing endlessly along the edges of his soul in search of some buried hunger deep enough to hook.

Khorne had always been simpler.

A voice screaming until screaming became silence.

The endless thunder of drums beneath every act of violence.

One more battle, one more skull, another drop of blood cast into an ocean that could never be filled.

Now blood filled the sky.

The crimson clouds above the arena had swollen into a vast spiral around the hurricane consuming Angron. They stretched far beyond the ruined battlefield, dragging themselves downward from the upper atmosphere as though the storm possessed enough hunger to pull the heavens apart. Scarlet lightning crawled through their depths, illuminating rivers of blood turning slowly within the clouds.

The arena groaned beneath it.

Broken arches bent toward the vortex. Bodies skidded across the gore-slick stone before vanishing into the storm. Shards of armor, weapons, bone, and masonry hammered against Abaddon's wards in flashes of black light.

He barely noticed.

Abaddon raised his eyes beyond the clouds.

Beyond the arena he had forged for the death of a Primarch.

Beyond matter, distance, and every comforting lie reality told about where one thing ended and another began.

The Warp opened before his sight.

Eight points of burning wrath stared back.

They were so far away that he did not have words to give the thought shape.

They were close enough to scorch the idea of shape itself.

Around them stretched the suggestion of something too vast for measurement: brass drowned beneath oceans of blood, mountains of skulls rising toward a horizon that curled beneath its own impossible weight, and somewhere beyond all of it, the shadow of a throne.

Something upon that throne had leaned forward.

For the first time since the storm began, Abaddon forgot the battle around him.

His gaze lowered toward the hurricane.

Warm blood ran down through the collar of his armor. A broken femur struck one shoulder and shattered against his wards. Stone fragments rattled from his breastplate. At the center of the storm, Angron bellowed with enough force to turn mortal hearing into ruin.

Yet beneath the sound, beneath the storm, Abaddon felt something stranger.

Interference.

Resistance.

Khorne's fury was reaching for his favored toy and failing to close its hand.

"The power is being deflected."

Mortarion's voice carried through the gale as a low, disquieted hiss.

The Death Lord stood braced several paces away, one gauntleted hand clenched around Silence while his wings strained against the wind. Plague-smoke streamed from the vents of his armor in ragged green-black ribbons, torn apart almost as quickly as it formed.

His hooded gaze remained fixed upon Angron.

"Khorne is being…"

Mortarion stopped. For perhaps the first time that day, Abaddon heard uncertainty enter his allies voice.

"…dispersed."

His vast fingers tightened around the haft of Silence.

"That should be impossible."

"And yet," Abaddon said, bending to recover Drach'nyen, "it is."

His fingers closed around the hilt, and the demon blade awakened eagerly in his grasp. Black vapor spilled from its edge. Faces surfaced within the blue metal for fractions of a second, mouths stretching open as the weapon tasted the violence saturating the air.

Straightening, his eyes searched through the Bloodstorm.

Past the Lion.

Past Guilliman.

Past the radiant Saint struggling against the gale.

Until they found the pale-blue armored mortal anchored to the earth by a single taut cable.

For a moment, Abaddon simply studied him.

The absurdly small figure standing at the center of something that had made a God lean forward.

He raised Drach'nyen and pointed its edge through the storm.

"I believe," he said, "we have finally found Angron's so-called Wound."

---

Guilliman stared into the hurricane. One hand wiped his helm as blood-rain lashed across the armor. He fought to keep Angron's silhouette in sight through the spinning wall of bone and gore.

"Are you sure?!" he shouted toward Celestine. "Truly sure?!"

"I am, my lord!"

One luminous wing had curled above her like a shield against the storm. A chunk of stone struck the holy feathers and vanished in a burst of white-gold flame, leaving only sparks to be torn away by the gale.

Celestine's silver eyes remained fixed upon the vortex.

"A human soul remains! I have never witnessed anything like this before! There are fractures running through the demon's metaphysical structure—gaps where something buried beneath it can still be seen!"

Disbelief had stripped some of the calm from her face. She looked toward Angron as though staring through layers of flesh, rage, and godhood that should never have been separable.

"The mortal is correct, my lord! This may be your only chance!"

Guilliman turned back toward the storm.

Blood and shattered bone spiraled upward into the crimson heavens. Somewhere inside that screaming wall was a brother he had considered dead for ten thousand years.

A brother he had mourned poorly.

A brother he had buried beneath the certainty of what he had become.

A brother who, against everything he knew, might still be waiting beneath all of it.

Guilliman looked down at Koron. The mortal remained anchored to the earth by both grappling lines, cables drawn taut enough to hum beneath the strain. His boots slid in short, jerking increments across the blood-slick stone while both arms fought to keep him upright.

"If this restores my brother," Guilliman said, "I shall owe you more than I could ever repay."

His expression hardened.

"If this kills him, you will owe a debt you can never repay."

Koron held his gaze through the storm.

"I know!"

Another gust struck him.

His feet tore loose for half a second before the grapples snapped him back into place. Koron leaned into the cables and shouted over the gale.

"Now go be a big damn hero already!"

Guilliman turned.

Lion was already beside him.

The Emperor's Shield stood raised against the hurricane, its golden surface almost hidden beneath streaming blood. Bone fragments and shattered stone hammered against it in a ceaseless metallic rattle.

Guilliman stared at him.

"What are you doing?"

"Coming with you."

"Koron said—"

"He said this was the story of our family."

Lion adjusted his footing as another gust slammed into the Shield. His boots ground backward an inch through the gore before finding purchase again.

His pale hair whipped across his face.

His eyes never left the storm.

"I will not watch one brother walk alone into hell."

He angled the Emperor's Shield toward the vortex.

"Come."

Guilliman stared at him for half a heartbeat.

Then reached out and struck one hand against Lion's shoulder.

Lion lowered his center of gravity.

The Shield came down before them.

Together, the brothers leaned into it.

Blood struck like rain driven from a cannon. Bone screamed past in white arcs. The wind clawed at their armor and tried to drag their feet from beneath them.

Lion took the first step.

Guilliman followed.

Together, they went to find their brother.

 

[Fragment of Serenity]

Well that's... one way to trying something. I guess the real question will be if that change wraps his brain in a loop: pain generates rage which generate more pain.

Angron might very well have his own brain burn out. Which would be... unpleasant.

 

[Talon88.1]

Well that's... one way to trying something. I guess the real question will be if that change wraps his brain in a loop: pain generates rage which generate more pain.

Angron might very well have his own brain burn out. Which would be... unpleasant.

Click to shrink...

The next few chapters will have an answer for that

 

[Talon88.1]

Chapter Seventy-Five

---

Reminder dear listeners, the Voxbox remains open at all times!

---

Well, here we are. This chapter takes a big swing, and I'm looking forward to hearing what you guys think.

As promised, the Voxbox is open! AMA, questions about what happens here, whatever—I'm happy to answer anything that isn't overly spoilertastic.

Now, on with the show!

---

"So," Koron said, bracing a boot against the inhumanly large spinal column, "do this often?" His sole slipped over blood-slick bone before catching against the splintered edge of a vertebra.

Beyond their meager shelter of torn Warp-flesh, blood swept across the arena in sheets. It pooled in the seams between the stones, then rose in long red streamers as the hurricane scoured the ground. Fragments of paving rattled against the far side of the carcass.

Through gaps in the driving spray, two immense figures advanced, their silhouettes steady amid the tumbling wreckage. Ragged cloth streamed from one; the other carried his massive shoulders beneath a crown of spikes.

Celestine crouched beside him, her white wings folded tightly enough for the outer feathers to trail through the bloody grit. Blood filled the chased lines of her golden armor and dripped from the buckled rim of one pauldron. Her silver eyes followed the plates of his left forearm as they flowed back over the exposed machinery, returning his arm to normal.

A wet strand of silver hair clung to her cheek. She tucked it behind her ear, jerked it back again when it whipped across her mouth a second time, and settled her hand on her sword again. "What, fight demon Primarchs and the Warmaster of Chaos, or witness something that calls my entire understanding of the Warp into question?"

"…I had a line about dinner, but you ruined it."

Her mouth curved, briefly easing the strain around her eyes. "Survive this, and you may try again."

He offered his metal hand, keeping the small pile of stones secured in the crook of his other arm. "Koron."

She clasped it, then recoiled with a sharp hiss. Her gauntlet rasped across his palm as she pulled away, fingers curling toward her breastplate. She looked from her hand to his face, recognition settling into a rueful smile.

"Ah. Right, blank." She flexed her fingers once before returning them to the hilt. "In any case, I am Celestine. A pleasure, Koron, for however long we have."

"Sorry." he muttered as he lowered his hand, looking towards the approaching figures that disappeared for a moment behind another curtain of blood, their outlines briefly picked out by the wreckage breaking against them. "So, which one do you want? Basement dweller or stupid hairdo?"

She paused, parsing out which was which. "…I shall take Mortarion. You would have difficulty following him into the air." She eased her sword clear of the stone, keeping its point low as she gathered her feet beneath her. Mud clung to the gilded plates over her knees. "You do not intend to face Abaddon blade to blade, correct?"

"Fuck no. I'm going to run away and shout insults. Maybe throw a rock or two."

"A sound beginning." Her wings contracted as a length of torn tendon whipped overhead. It struck the flesh-wall behind them with a heavy, wet thunk, sending a shudder through the bone beneath Koron's boot. Celestine steadied herself against the stone, her grip firm on her sword. "The Emperor's blessings upon us both."

"Think I'm going to need the extra hand."

The wind bent around the approaching giants. Mortarion advanced with his head thrust forward beneath his sodden hood, respirator hoses curving from his face into the stained metal of his breastplate. Corrosion crusted the seams of his armor. His ragged wings stirred in currents that should have hurled him sideways, their torn membranes flexing above the swaying chains and censers.

Beside him, Abaddon's topknot and tabard moved as though in a summer breeze. Blood streamed over the gold ornamentation of his black plate, filling the eye sockets of the skulls mounted upon it before overflowing down his chest. His bare, scarred face remained turned toward their shelter. Fragments of bone rattled beneath his boots; the larger pieces broke underfoot.

"You are far from what I expected, little Wound." Abaddon's voice reached them whole through the hurricane. Whatever carried it placed the words unpleasantly close, as though the Warmaster had leaned over Koron's shoulder to speak.

Koron glanced at Celestine, then down at his mud and blood-smeared armor and the rocks bundled against his chest. Crouched behind a pillar of bone with an armful of stones, he had the distinct appearance of a delinquent who had seriously misjudged the neighborhood.

"Wound?" His helmet's speakers pushed the word into the gale.

Mortarion turned his hooded head. Yellowed eyes settled on Koron from above the respirator, and the long fingers encircling Silence tightened against its haft. "You do not know? How interesting."

"As interesting as your Death Guard dying in Hyperia?"

Celestine's eyes cut toward him. Across the rubble-strewn arena, Mortarion stopped. His chains swung forward with the arrested movement, censers knocking against the corroded plates of his armor. A thick exhalation escaped his respirator and shredded across his chest.

"…Those machines." The Death Lord's voice acquired a terrible precision. "You built those damnable Animus."

Koron worked a pebble loose from his collection. Before he could throw it, a gust snatched it from his fingers. He watched it vanish into the red haze, sighed, then raised his middle finger instead.

"Yup. Holy fire's a real bitch for those fat fuckers you call sons, isn't it?"

Mortarion answered with a bolt of seething filth.

Koron flinched behind his raised forearm. The mass struck the edge of his null field and came apart, its churning surface collapsing into a shower of dead flies and rotting matter. Wet clumps struck the stones; the wind scattered the smaller remnants across the arena floor.

His breathing rasped inside the helmet. He lowered his arm enough to inspect the mess, then swallowed. "Shit. I was really hoping that would work."

"A blank," Abaddon murmured. His gaze lingered on the space where Mortarion's attack had unraveled. "So that is part of it. Mortarion, occupy the witch. This one is mine."

Celestine drove upward before the Death Lord could strike again. Her wings opened beyond the shelter of the broken spine, and the gale caught them hard enough to wrench her sideways. She rolled with it, folding one wing while the other swept her into a steep, slanting climb. White feathers scattered through the red spray.

Mortarion's corpse-flesh wings spread, lifting his corroded bulk from the rubble. Chains trailed beneath him as he rose to intercept her. Above the broken parapets, Celestine's sword blazed gold against the descending blade of Silence, briefly lighting the blood streaming from her armor.

Koron let the stones fall and vaulted onto the spine's sloping end. He backed along the slick bone, keeping the jagged ridge of vertebrae between himself and the Warmaster for as long as he could. The moment he rose above their shelter, a gust struck him broadside. His boots slid across the wet curve, jarring his knees as one heel caught in a fracture. He tore it free, recovered on the next step, and staggered down into the rubble with one shoulder lowered into the gale.

'Modeling is active,' Sasha said. 'His warp bullshit defenses are interfering with the prediction threads. Confidence is fluctuating badly.'

'Increase sensor fidelity to max. Collapse the observation volume to fifty meters. Fewer inputs, higher resolution.'

'Done. That helps. It's still ugly.'

'Better ugly than dead.'

Abaddon followed at a measured pace, Drach'nyen held low. The sword's outline shifted as it drew nearer to Koron, its edge wandering beyond the blade before snapping back into place. The Warmaster adjusted his grip, gauntleted fingers tightening around the hilt.

At his other side, the Talon of Horus flexed with slow mechanical deliberation. Blood ran along its hooked claws and fell from their points, the wound inflicted by the Sword still oozing.

"I don't suppose you'd consider calling it a day?"

Black fire swallowed Abaddon.

Sasha's warning cracked through Koron's thoughts. He hurled himself sideways, shoulder striking the dirt and rolling forward, his metal fingers finding the rubble, pushing off as he uncoiled to land on his feet nearly ten feet from where he had been. As for Abaddon, he emerged six meters away, Drach'nyen already sweeping through a killing stroke.

Koron bounced on his toes, his boots grinding loose fragments from the masonry. Across the gap, Abaddon arrested the stroke. Black flame guttered around his greaves and vanished. He stood motionless, sword extended, looking first at Koron and then toward the flashes of gold above the walls.

"…Six meters," he mused. "Yet she could shelter beside you without pain." He began moving along the slab. Koron matched him, circling to keep the heap of masonry and torn flesh between them. Abaddon's eyes narrowed as the distance held.

"Those things should not both be possible."

Koron shortened his steps and kept his weight low, watching the sword. White-gold fire flashed overhead, briefly illuminating the skulls mounted on Abaddon's armor and the dark stains filling their teeth. Beyond the Warmaster's shoulder, Celestine wheeled above the broken wall. One white wing caught the light before Mortarion's spreading vapor swallowed her again.

"You really shouldn't be commenting on people being contradictory, you know," Koron said. "You're a walking, talking contradiction."

Abaddon raised a scarred brow. "You presume much to speak as though you know me."

"I'm serious. You hate your father's failure. You hate the leash the Four put around his throat. Hell, you hate it enough that you've spent ten thousand years using them without letting them own you. Which, just so we're clear, is an impressive feat all by itself."

A gust drove bloody grit against Koron's visor. He turned his helmet enough to see through the smear as the Warmaster stepped over a broken column without disturbing his measured pace.

"But Horus turned against the Emperor because of the lies, the manipulation, everything surrounding Chaos." Koron lifted a hand briefly, then lowered it as his heel found loose stone. He shifted his weight forward before it could roll beneath him. "What I don't understand is why you hate the Emperor so much."

Abaddon straightened. Plates shifted around his shoulders, lifting the trophy racks above him. Blood dripped from a broken jawbone mounted among the spikes. One long claw of the Talon extended, its point turning toward Koron.
"Because he made us weapons and called us sons. Because he built an empire upon conquest and named it enlightenment. Because he demanded truth while hiding the greatest threat humanity had ever faced."

His voice carried each word cleanly through the storm. The claw remained steady while wind dragged ribbons of blood from its edge.

"Because every corpse produced by that falsehood lies at his feet."

Koron listened until he finished, then gave a short, sharp nod. "Okay."

Abaddon's next step came a fraction late.

"…Okay?"

"Yeah. Those are legitimate grievances."

The Warmaster studied the dark, blood-smeared visor. His extended claw slowly relaxed toward his palm. For several seconds, the hurricane filled the silence between them.

"From what I read in Guilliman's files," Koron continued, "those were Horus's grievances too. Is that still what you're fighting for?"

"I am not my father. His purpose and his methods both led him to failure."

"By submitting to the four fuckers?"

"You should speak of them with more respect."

"Why? You don't."

"I have a partnership with them." Abaddon's claws spread slightly, their edges glinting in the blood-light. "You are beneath their notice. If one truly turned its attention upon you, there would be nothing left."

Koron risked a glance toward the bloodstorm. Its circling wall filled the gaps between the shattered warp-flesh, carrying slabs of stone and lengths of torn metal upward. Wreckage surfaced briefly in the churning red before the current dragged it higher, shrinking it to dark flecks that vanished into the haze.

Somewhere inside that fury, Angron remained hidden.

"One just did."

Abaddon's gaze followed his for an instant, taking in the towering wall of blood beyond the storm. "They are gods—"

"That word's doing a lot of work, Abaddon. You keep using it as though the outcome's already decided."

"Their power exceeds yours by measures you lack the means to comprehend."

"Then explain the six meters."

Abaddon stepped inward.

Sasha's warning flashed across Koron's vision as the Warmaster's sword arm moved. Koron shot forward, knees folding beneath him, boots skidding forward through the wet grit.

Drach'nyen swept above his helmet, close enough for its passage to strip the bloody spray from his visor. For an instant, he saw the Warmaster clearly through the cleared glass, his scarred face composed above the descending curve of his sword arm.

Koron planted his metal palm in the muck and threw himself into a backward flip. His boots struck loose rubble and slid, forcing him into a low crouch before he could push upright.

"You have obstructed one means of reaching you." Abaddon continued, as though the attack had not occurred.

"Yup. There are conditions under which it works, and conditions under which it fails," Koron replied, forcing as much nonchalance into his voice as he could.

"Drach'nyen will require very little assistance crossing the remaining distance."

"Which is why I'm still running away." His next breath rasped inside the helmet. "Your Four? If their power were absolute, you might have a point."

Abaddon brought the sword back with effortless control, turning his wrist until the blade lay low beside his leg. The faint amusement had left his face.

"Careful."

"I am being careful."

Koron took another step back, testing the churned earth before trusting it with his weight. Water and blood welled around the edge of his boot. He shifted onto a firmer patch and jerked his chin toward the storm.

"Because if Khorne were truly absolute, that wouldn't be happening."

"You believe yourself capable of defying a god?"

"I believe I found the limits of a very powerful entity."

Above them, gold light burst through Mortarion's vapor. Something struck the walls hard enough to send a shudder through the arena floor. Loose stones jumped around Koron's boots, and he bent his knees with the tremor. Across from him, Abaddon's stance scarcely shifted. The chains hanging from his trophy racks knocked softly against his armor.

"My attempt on Angron is doing something," Koron continued. "Khorne can't simply reach through reality, remove my hands, and put everything back the way it was."

"If he could—" He snapped his fingers, the small click lost beneath the hurricane. "—he would. Which leaves only a few options. Either—"

"—Either he cannot," Abaddon cut in, "or he chooses not to."

"Exacto. And Khorne deciding to let someone tamper with his greatest weapon?" Koron nodded toward the hurricane. Torn metal flashed within its circling wall, briefly catching the light before disappearing into the red.

"Does that look like a measured response to you?"

A length of flesh whipped across the ground and caught around a broken pillar. Koron checked his next step as it drew taut, tore free, and lashed away into the haze. Abaddon watched him recover his footing.

"You really think he's choosing restraint?" Koron asked.

"And you think he is bound?" The question came easily, accompanied by a faint curl of the lip. "You believe you have disproven divinity because you found resistance?"

"I think I found evidence against omnipotence. Their power has limits, and those limits matter."

Abaddon continued circling, his strides shortened and his pale gaze moving between Koron and the storm. A blood-soaked skull bounced out of the haze and split against the ground. Koron stepped around the fragments and steadied himself against a broken column.

"They're incredibly powerful entities operating under a different set of rules," Koron said. "Immaterium versus Materium. Warp versus reality. Physics versus metanarrative."

The hurricane tugged at his next step. He leaned into it and kept the Warmaster squarely in front of him.

"Different systems. Different laws. And as we both know, mortals can overpower localized Warp phenomena." He tapped his armored chest. "Case in point."

"The storm tells you that something has happened," Abaddon replied, dismissing Koron's argument with a wave of the Talon. "You have yet to discover what."

Koron swallowed, watching the sword settle beside the Warmaster's leg. Bloody water ran from its tip, briefly marking the stones before the wind scattered it.

"Fair. But, for the moment, Khorne is having trouble undoing it."

"You presume to understand his intentions."

"I can see the response. I can measure some of what changed. His intentions are still a guess."

"You wager a Primarch upon the distinction."

Koron's grip tightened against the column. Beyond Abaddon's shoulder, a length of broken railing rose through the hurricane and vanished into the spray. "Yes, and we're about to find out what it costs. And I'm going to have to live with that."

"Should you live at all."

Koron returned his attention to Drach'nyen. "Your sword can still cut my head off. Your teleport brought you up short. Both of those facts matter."

Abaddon took another step, forcing Koron to turn with him. The Warmaster's armored bulk filled more of the gap beside the column.

"Extend that conclusion too far and you die."

"Agreed." Koron eased his weight off the stone and tested a patch of exposed rock with his heel. His boot held. "Their power gives me plenty of reasons to be careful. These limits give me somewhere to start."

He released the column, flexing the grit from his metal fingers. "And then we have another point of interest. Slaanesh was born from the Eldar."

"You tread thin ice."

"Why? It happened. A species poured enough of itself into the Warp that a new god emerged."

Abaddon advanced as Koron spoke, angling him toward a jumble of fallen masonry. Koron felt his heel catch against a buried edge. A warning flared across his visor, and he threw his weight sideways as Drach'nyen struck where his chest had been.

The blade passed through the column behind him as though it were made of paper.

Koron slid past its broken end, boots rattling over loose fragments. The severed stone shifted with a deep grinding sound, opening a pale seam through the blood-darkened surface. Then the hurricane caught it. The upper section toppled and rolled across the floor, crushing smaller debris beneath it.

"And that god arrived powerful enough to stand beside the others." Koron drew a breath and moved along the edge of the wreckage, keeping it between them. "Are the other three eternal? Or were they made too?"

"You confuse origin with weakness." Abaddon brought his sword clear of the falling dust, his eyes still fixed on Koron.

"Origin means there's a mechanism. There are inputs, and they affect what comes out. That gives me something to investigate."

"The Eldar supplied those inputs. Consider how much choice they had over what emerged."

Koron made a finger-gun with his metal hand and snapped it toward the towering monster. "They set something in motion without understanding what they were making. That gives me a very good reason to learn."

"And you expect understanding to grant you mastery?"

"I expect it to improve my chances of not repeating their mistakes."

"And how many lives will you spend acquiring that understanding?"

Koron lowered his hand as blood washed through the pale cut in the column. "Someone was already spending Angron's life. I've tried to give him another outcome."

"Your compassion offers him little protection from your mistakes."

"True," Koron admitted. "It doesn't. I'm responsible for what this does, and I'll need to understand the result before I try anything larger."

Abaddon studied him then, a spark of genuine disbelief rising in his eyes. "You truly intend to learn the gods."

"I intend to learn what happens when they interact with us. I want to know where their power comes through, what interferes with it, and what I can do when I reach for their throats."

"And you place great faith in the other three allowing you to continue."

Koron let out a short laugh. "Please. Even you cannot say that with a straight face. They're allies of convenience. Bird brain is laughing his ass off right now, and you damn well know it."

Abaddon conceded the point with the faintest incline of his head. "Perhaps, yet each success gives them another reason to set those rivalries aside."

"And that part scares the shit out of me." Koron snatched a white tendon out of the air before it slammed around his waist, tossing it away with a flick of his wrist. "I'll need other people working on this, more ways to protect them, and enough understanding that killing me doesn't put everything back where it was."

"You would share whatever power you discovered?"

"If killing one engineer puts everyone back in chains, I've left a fairly obvious fault in the design."

"You propose to make yourself a threat they must answer."

Koron was quiet long enough to hear his breathing beneath the gale. His shoulder throbbed where it had struck the masonry. "I'll have to account for it. Right now, I'm trying to get one man out of that storm."

"Fool. Those beings existed before you were born, and they will exist after you are dust."

"Fun fact." Koron raised one metal finger. "Slaanesh is younger than I am."

The Warmaster stopped.

Behind him, a section of the ruined wall sagged and collapsed into the haze. Abaddon did not look away.

Koron's grin lasted perhaps another half-second before his predictive model caught up with his mouth.

Oh, shit.

The creases between Abaddon's brows eased. His sword lowered a few inches, and his gaze traveled over the unfamiliar contours of Koron's armor. It lingered on the smooth plates of his forearms, followed them down to the articulated metal fingers, then returned to his visor.

"An unusual claim."

Koron lowered his hand. His eyes flicked toward the remaining cover: broken slabs, the stump of the severed column, gaps through which the Warmaster hopefully couldn't follow him.

"I had an awful travel agent, what can I say?"

"You speak as though you remember an age before the Fall." Abaddon's voice had grown quieter, yet every word reached Koron through the storm.

"I speak like someone being chased by a man carrying a demon sword. My diction is under considerable strain."

Abaddon crossed the opening beside the fallen column, closing the easiest path through the rubble. The barrels atop the Talon followed Koron's shift toward the second gap, then lowered by a few deliberate degrees.

"You have made yourself interesting," the Warmaster said. "I will hear what you believe you can accomplish."

Koron angled toward the second gap.

"How generous."

"Be certain you understand what is keeping you alive."

Abaddon settled his weight, Drach'nyen resting low beside his leg. "You speak of the gods, of the long game, as though they are entities a thing like you can influence. Even if they are not true gods, they possess enough power to act as them."

"Yeah," Koron said. "You might be right. I'm completely out of my depth here." His right hand settled against his thigh, fingers brushing the edge of the battered armor. "I'm still going to try."

"Why? They have outlived greater men than you and consumed entire civilizations."

A fresh curtain of blood swept across the arena. Koron turned his shoulder into it until Abaddon blurred into a dark mass crowned with spikes. "Two reasons. First, that's why I went out into the black in the first place. To discover, to explore, to leave my little corner of reality a little better than I found it."

His fingers stilled against the damaged plate. "Then I found a little town, and a family who kept going when they had almost nothing left. They still found ways to help each other. I couldn't look myself in the eye if I gave up when they refused to."

Abaddon let the silence stretch.

"And the second reason?"

Koron pointed at him. "You."

"…Explain."

"You've spent ten thousand years refusing to give them everything they want. You've kept enough of yourself to keep making that choice. I take that seriously."

"I command armies they desire to use. Each would rather see me remain unclaimed than belong wholly to another. Every bargain preserves that tension."

"Then there are reasons it works."

"For me." Abaddon lifted the Talon a fraction, touching one long claw to his breastplate. The point rested among the gold ornamentation, wet with blood. "What do you possess that would make your survival worth such concessions?"

Koron glanced toward the bloodstorm, where wreckage climbed through its circling wall.

"At the moment? An exceptional talent for pissing them off."

"A talent shared by a great many dead men."

"Yeah. I'll need something better." The answer came without a grin.

"You could learn every term of my bargains and still lack the power to enforce one."

"Your armies, their rivalries, the things you can offer or withhold—all of that matters. I'll have to understand it."

"And you believe you can reproduce what I have achieved?"

"I believe it deserves studying." Koron spread his hands in a brief shrug, then lowered them as the wind shifted against his back. "Ten thousand years, Abaddon. Whatever it has cost you, they're still negotiating. That's a hell of a result."

Abaddon rolled one armored shoulder. "I am simply better than most at finding where the seams are."

"And yet you refuse to bend the knee."

"I will not repeat my father's mistake."

"So why are you repeating his greatest?"

Drach'nyen snapped into line with Koron's throat.

Warnings flared across his visor, and he checked his next step, weight caught between his planted foot and the one he had begun to lift. The blade's edge seemed to draw in the surrounding light. Above it, the Warmaster's scarred face stood sharply defined against the red haze.

"I have remained free," Abaddon said. "My father surrendered himself to—"

"—I mean his war with the Emperor. With the Imperium. You've spent ten thousand years carrying it forward."

"Beware, boy." Abaddon's voice dropped, each word reaching Koron with an intimacy the hurricane should have made impossible. "I have killed better men for less."

"I have no doubt about that."

Beneath his helmet, Koron eased his clenched teeth apart. His jaw ached. He set his raised foot down carefully, keeping his eyes on the sword.

"You said the Emperor used you, lied to you, and hid what he wanted until you'd already helped him get it. How many of those charges apply to the Four?"

"I enter their bargains knowing what they are. The Emperor demanded the devotion owed a father while concealing the purpose for which he spent his sons."

Koron considered that. "Knowing the price matters. I'll give you that."

"You also mistake my grievance for some tender concern for every mortal beneath an overseer's lash." Abaddon's sword remained steady as bloody water gathered along its lower edge. "The Legions earned their place. Horus surrendered the cause for which we rebelled. His failure leaves that cause to those capable of completing it."

"Then let's stick to the freedom you actually care about. Yours."

"My freedom remains intact."

"Right now, it does. What happens if winning this war leaves you ruling something that needs their power to keep functioning?"

"You presume I intend to permit that dependence."

"I presume you've thought about it."

A gust pressed Koron against the broken column. He gripped it hard enough to punch his fingers into the warp-flesh until the pressure eased.

"You know what their gifts cost. How do you stop those costs growing faster than the power you're buying?"

Abaddon's claws closed slowly, blood threading between the articulated joints.

"By ensuring that each bargain leaves me stronger."

Koron raised his right hand, counting off the victories. "Fine. Let's run that testbed. You kill the Emperor. Earth burns. The Imperium collapses. Chaos wins, cake and cookies all around." His hand lowered. "What do you do then?"

A smile eased across Abaddon's scarred face. He spread his arms over the shattered arena, Talon open and Drach'nyen extended.

"I take back what is ours."

"Meaning?"

"The Imperium. Humanity. The empire we conquered while your species still remembered what progress meant." He spoke with the assurance of a man naming possessions temporarily beyond his reach. "We built it. We bled for it. And we will rule what we made."

Koron backed beneath a tilted slab of the fallen flesh-wall, where the wind split around its edges and left a narrow stretch of steadier footing.

"Okay. You rule it. You've spent ten thousand years feeding soldiers, slaves, souls, and whole worlds to the four fuckers because you needed their power. Does that stop when you take Earth?"

Abaddon's arms settled at his sides. Koron watched the sword lower before continuing.

"How do you maintain an empire after gutting the Mechanicus and replacing it with the Dark Mechanicum? How do you build infrastructure when your engineers keep going through with their whole 'We don't need eyes where we are going' routine? And if the Astartes rule, who checks the Astartes?"

Abaddon let him continue, his pale eyes following Koron's passage around the wreckage.

"You've got berserkers, sorcerers, plague cults, demon princes, warlords, pirates, and gods all cooperating because they share one enormous enemy. Now, you kill the enemy. What holds them together afterward?"

Above them, gold fire flickered through plague vapor. A heavy impact shook the ruined seating. Abaddon glanced toward it, then returned his attention to Koron.

"And the four fuckers still want their share," Koron said. "The problem is, Abaddon, their share is made out of your citizens. You conquer humanity and spend eternity raising cattle for the things you swear you don't serve."

Abaddon laughed, deep and unhurried.

"The Astartes Legions will follow. Their rightful place in the new order will be assured, and obedience will serve their interests. The forges you mock supply the fleets that brought me here. I have spent ten thousand years securing routes, bargaining for provisions, and breaking rebellions. The work of sustaining an empire is familiar to me."

"Then you know how much your allies consume."

"I know what persuades them to obey. Worlds, recruitment, access to the means of war. Each Legion will receive its due, and each will have something to lose by breaking faith."

"People," Koron said. "Their due is people."

"Indeed. Sacrifices will be made for the greater good."

Abaddon gave the admission without hesitation.

"The Legions will rule their dominions. I will hold the fleets and routes upon which their power depends. They will answer for what they squander."

"And when one of their gods tells them to take more?"

"Then I will face a rebellion. I already face rebellions. Victory removes the cost of fighting the Imperium while I put them down."

Koron was silent for a moment.

"A united mankind would give me resources beyond those of a thousand scattered warlords," the Warmaster continued. "Worlds brought into production. Fleets rebuilt. Strength restored."

His smile returned by degrees. "And then, once enough strength has been recovered, old arrangements can be… renegotiated."

Koron stared at him. He took one final step beneath the wall's overhang, where the driving sheets of blood broke into a fine mist. A sequence of release clicks sounded through his helmet. Its plates separated along narrow seams and folded away from his face, withdrawing into the collar.

The wind struck his exposed skin. He blinked against the spray as blood spattered his cheek. The air smelled of iron and torn meat.

Abaddon's gaze settled upon the uncovered face. The fingers of the Talon grew still. His eyes traced Koron's jaw, brow, and blood-plastered hair with an attention that raised the hairs on Koron's neck. Something shifted behind his expression—recognition without understanding.

"So your plan," Koron said slowly, interrupting Abaddon's train of thought, "is to win first and use the empire to solve Chaos afterward."

"To dictate better terms."

Koron raised one metal finger at each point. "Unify humanity through conquest. Accept terrible compromises because you need them to win. Promise that once you're strong enough, you'll deal with the things you had to do along the way."

One corner of his mouth lifted. "One might even call that a Great Crusade."

Abaddon's lips went thin.

"I am nothing like him." His voice hardened. "The warriors who conquer my empire will govern it. They know what I intend to give them, and what I require in return."

"Yup. He lied. You're telling your soldiers what the deal is. Gold star." Koron wiped the spray from his cheek, leaving a red smear across the back of his hand. "And both plans depend on winning enough power to fix the compromises that helped you win it."

"You have already heard how I intend to acquire that power."

"I have. Let's say you succeed. Your will keeps the Legions in line. Your judgment keeps the Four bargaining. Eventually, though, you'll be gone. They'll still be here. What happens if somebody kills you?"

"My successor will inherit the strength I have assembled."

"Along with the obligations, the rivalries, and four very interested Warp entities. How much of your independence can he actually inherit?"

"Every ruler must consider what follows him."

"Correct." Koron then jabbed a finger at Angron. "And we've got a pretty fucking large example of what happens when an empire needs one exceptional man to keep making everything work."

"An empire that has endured ten thousand years while that man sits dead upon his throne."

"And you've spent those same years telling everyone what a fucking disaster it became." Koron held his gaze. "Build something that can survive you with its promises intact."

The wind drove a sheet of blood around the slab. Koron did not turn his face aside, refusing to let the Warmaster out of his sight.

"Your successor needs armies that will follow him when the gods object. He needs forges that keep producing when the demons leave. He needs some way to refuse the bill without everything falling apart around him. How do you give him that?"

"By reducing those dependencies as our strength permits. Even kings require allies."

"Of course they do. I'm asking what happens when your allies can shut down the empire unless it keeps feeding them. At that point, you've built a throne for a puppet ruler."

"I am no puppet."

"Then stop paying."

Abaddon shifted ever so slightly, as though expecting a bolt from on high to descend. "To discard useful power in the midst of a war would be an act of extraordinary stupidity. I will choose the moment when I can afford to dispense with it."

Koron nodded slowly. "And how do you get to that moment?"

"By winning."

"With their weapons, their engines, and commanders who answer to them. Every year of this war gives you reasons to buy more of what you're trying to outgrow. You're counting how much stronger conquest makes you. How much stronger does it make them?"

"And you propose to remedy that dependence by surrendering my advantage?"

"I think it's worth asking what keeps making their help necessary." Koron braced his palm against the broken wall. "You've been very clear about your father. Have you ever considered what you could build if you stopped trying to finish his war?"

Abaddon studied the strange little man beneath the broken flesh-wall. Blood had turned his blond hair crimson and plastered it against his forehead.

"You propose I surrender?"

Koron almost laughed. "No. Just stop."

He lowered himself into a crouch. With one metal fingertip, he drew a rough circle through the sheltered silt and scored a line across its middle. Blood seeped into the groove.

"The galaxy already split itself in half for you." He tapped one side of the circle. "Take Nihilus."

Abaddon looked down at the crude map, then back at him.

"Claim it. Hold it. Build something," Koron said. "You've spent ten thousand years telling everyone the Emperor built humanity wrong. Fine. Prove it."

From this low angle, the Warmaster's armor filled most of Koron's view. The hooked fingers of the Talon hung above the little circle in the mud.

"You hate the Emperor's Imperium? Build a better one. You think Astartes deserved a place in what they created? Figure out what that place should actually be. You think humanity was lied to? Tell them the truth. You think Chaos can be used without being worshiped? Show us how it can be done right."

Koron rested his forearm across one raised knee. "You've got half a galaxy sitting there waiting for someone to make it function. Stop trying to finish your father's war and start your own civilization."

Abaddon's laughter rumbled through the arena.

"You speak as though I could declare peace and watch ten thousand years of hatred vanish. You offer something you cannot give. Nihilus holds Imperial worlds, Astartes homeworlds, rival dominions, and xenos infestations. Who has empowered you to promise their submission?"

Koron's fingertip rested against the circle. "You're right. Those worlds have people on them, and plenty would fight you. I can offer my own work. I can put the case to Guilliman. His answer belongs to him."

"And the Chapter Masters? The governors? Every lord who would see peace as permission to pursue some private war?"

"They'll make their choices too."

"You propose that I begin another conquest while the first remains unfinished. I would have to break rival warlords, secure routes, restore industry, and defend what I built against enemies on every side."

"You'll have to do all of that after taking Earth. How many more worlds will need rebuilding by then?"

"Victory would free my forces to do it."

"And a functioning realm would give those forces something to stand on while they do. You said yourself that productive worlds would make you stronger."

"You offer me a quieter war and call it peace."

"I'm offering you something that might survive winning."

Abaddon looked down at the circle. Water had begun to erase its outer edge, carrying loose grains into the dividing line.

Koron wiped his mouth against his sleeve. "Governing it would be a bastard. Look at Guilliman. He's trying to hold everything together and still hasn't learned to delegate properly."

"To whom? The Imperium has few men he can trust with what must be delegated."

Koron conceded the point with a nod. "Also true. For both of you."

Abaddon turned Drach'nyen in his hand. Faces strained beneath its dark surface, mouths opening in silent cries.

"I would lose half my armies before the proclamation finished."

"I believe you."

"They would take their ships, their forges, and the routes they control. Some would turn upon those who remained. Your industrious little realm could die before its first harvest."

Koron let his hand fall away from the map and watched the dividing line fill with blood.

"That's a real danger. I haven't solved it."

"You have also misunderstood the promise that brought them to my banner. My vision includes the Emperor's death. A warrior who demands that I fulfill it has kept faith with me."

"They believe in the war you offered them." Koron met his gaze again. "I'm asking whether everything that war demands is still worth what you expect to get from it."

"It will give us what was taken."

"Then show yourself what you can make of something you already hold. Pick one world. Restore its fields, get its industry working, and protect what it produces, including from your own allies."

"And you expect this experiment to dissolve ten thousand years of hatred?"

"I expect it to give you something you might want to keep. See who wants to help you keep it."

Another face surfaced beneath Abaddon's thumb and thinned into a shallow ridge.

"You don't have to become good," Koron said.

Abaddon's eyes lifted to glare down at him. "How reassuring."

"I'm serious. Try becoming something other than what everyone expects you to be." Koron turned his empty hand palm-up. "I'll help you do it, too."

The Talon's slow flexing stopped, leaving its claws half-curled. Abaddon stared for a heartbeat, then drew his brow down.

"You lie."

"Abaddon." Koron's grin faded. "I want the war to stop. I want people to stop being butchered so four parasites in the Warp can gorge themselves. If helping you build something better gets me closer to that, why the hell wouldn't I?"

He jerked his thumb toward the hurricane. "And if you don't believe me, Exhibit A, Angron."

"…You are completely insane."

Koron glanced toward the bloodstorm. "Possibly."

He pushed himself upright and scraped a length of nerve from his greave against an exposed rib.

"You don't have to decide today, obviously. Lot of shit happening. Just think about what you want to leave behind."

Abaddon lowered Drach'nyen a hair. His gaze remained upon Koron's exposed face.

"You could be remembered as the Archtraitor, the man who cast down humanity's last bastion and delivered everyone inside it to the dark gods for an eternity of butchery. Or you could be the man who told both sides, 'Fuck you all, I'm choosing my own path,' and built a better realm than either the Emperor or the Four ever offered."

Blue light glimmered between the plates of Koron's left forearm. Abaddon's sword came up immediately. The Talon turned with it, bringing its barrels into line with Koron's chest.

Koron kept his arm low. The casing opened, exposing tiny articulated limbs that unfolded and blurred into motion. He sheltered the mechanism against his body as a small object emerged. He took it between his right thumb and forefinger, and the limbs withdrew behind closing plates.

He held up a tiny black rectangle, its smooth surface already beaded with blood.

"I gave Guilliman a version of this."

Abaddon's attention shifted to the object. His weapons remained raised.

"It's the data for a biocatalytic agricultural compound. It restores exhausted soil, strips out a truly stupid range of contaminants, helps pull toxins and radioactive particulates out of an atmosphere, and increases crop yields enough that your logistics officers will probably start proposing marriage."

Koron turned the chip, catching a narrow glint along its edge. "You asked what I possess that could make refusal possible. This is as good a start as any."

"Food." The word carried a barely restrained sneer. "Your answer to the Four is a harvest?"

"Food from fields you can restore without asking them."

Koron wiped the rectangle against a relatively clean patch of his armor. "I gave it to the Imperium because I wanted to see what they would do with it. Now I'm giving you the same chance." He extended his hand. "What will you do with it?"

Abaddon stood motionless. He knew the language of gifts: obligations, concessions, promises whose true wording emerged only after the bargain had been sealed. His eyes moved from the black rectangle to Koron's hand, then to his face.

"And if I use it to sustain armies that kill your Imperium?"

"I'm hoping you do better than that."

"You have described at length what my victories cost. Yet you would increase my means to win them."

Koron held his gaze as blood ran from his hairline along the side of his nose.

"I know this could help you hurt people. I also know those worlds need a way to recover. I'm choosing to give you one."

"And trusting me to use it as you wish."

"You'll make that choice yourself. I'm responsible for giving it to you." Koron turned the chip between his fingers. "You told me what rebuilding would take. Here's something to begin with."

Abaddon looked at the little rectangle for several seconds. Koron steadied his arm against the wind and waited.

"I am still going to try to kill you."

"I know." Koron's smile returned faintly. "Whatever happens to me, you'll still have the choice."

"You are either the bravest man I have met in ten thousand years…" The Warmaster's fist tightened on the hilt of his blade. "…or the greatest fool."

Koron lowered himself beside the slab and slipped the chip beneath a loose stone. He settled the stone over it, then ran a fingertip along the gap to check that the rectangle lay beyond the wind's reach. Only then did he rise and begin backing away.

"That'll depend on whether my idea works."

"Your idea?"

Koron motioned toward the storm hiding Angron.

"Stories. Belief shaped into a narrative. Right now? We're in a horror story. I want to tilt it just one degree toward adventure."

"So you mean to change the story as you see fit."

"Just like you, you mean?"

Abaddon ignored the barb. "And naturally, you fear what I might choose."

Koron nodded. "Of course."

The Warmaster studied him. "Yet you stand there."

"Yeah." Koron glanced toward Drach'nyen. "Fear is information. Right now it's telling me you could turn me into several interesting stains before I finish this sentence."

His eyes returned to Abaddon. "Doesn't mean it gets to make my decisions for me."

Slowly, Abaddon raised Drach'nyen in salute. The blade rose between them, its dark surface briefly reflecting the gold light of the battle overhead.

"I may at least try to make your death quick."

He managed a single step before the bloodstorm detonated.

---

Guilliman had known storms. He had crossed oceans beneath cyclones that tore warships from their anchorages, and marched through ash hurricanes on worlds where the atmosphere itself had caught fire. He had fought through Warp phenomena that turned men inside out, whispered with the voices of dead mothers, or convinced entire regiments that the ground beneath their feet had become an open mouth.

The first step into the Bloodstorm nearly tore the Shield from Lion's grasp.

Guilliman caught his brother's shoulder as the gale struck them both, his boots carving twin furrows through the arena floor. Blood painted blue plate black-red in seconds. Bone and shattered weapons hammered their armor with the cracks of small-arms fire.

Lion leaned into the Shield, angling its broad surface against the storm. Blood broke around it in curling wakes as he found enough purchase to advance. Guilliman followed close behind, the Sword raised beside his head.

Its golden flame remained bright, though the storm crowded against its light. Blood hissed into steam before touching the blade. Shapes Guilliman refused to study too closely recoiled from the fire and disappeared into the deeper red.

Five paces in, he looked back.

The arena had vanished. Celestine, Koron, Abaddon, and Mortarion were lost behind an unbroken wall of driven blood. He turned forward again, keeping his brother's armored back within reach.

Lion glanced over his shoulder, blood streaming from the edges of his helm.

"Still with me?!"

"For the moment!"

"Try to preserve that condition!"

Guilliman almost laughed. Then something struck the Shield hard enough to drive Lion backward a full step, forcing them shoulder to shoulder. A human skull spun through the gap beside its rim, jaw snapping against the few teeth that remained. Golden light flared from the Shield, and the skull burst between them.

Beyond the shield's protection, crimson vapor swallowed distance. Scarlet lightning revealed warriors locked together with weapons buried in one another, giants raising axes above massed armies, and horned shapes striding across battlefields that could not possibly fit inside the storm. Then the light failed and the blood closed over them.

He counted his steps, placing each boot carefully while the gale dragged at his balance.

Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five.

At thirty, his foot came down with a flat metallic ring.

Guilliman looked down. Brass stretched beneath their boots, its surface streaked with blood. He searched for the boundary they had crossed. The metal extended behind them into the red murk. One step had landed upon cracked flagstone. The next had found brass. Warmth registered through his armor. Shallow grooves branched across the surface, carrying thin streams of blood around their boots and into the storm.

Lion crouched behind the Shield and dragged two armored fingers across the metal. Blood parted beneath his gauntlet, exposing narrow scratches that quickly filled again. "It is real." His brother rose, keeping the shield angled into the gale. "For whatever meaning that word retains here."

Somewhere ahead, something struck. A low impact carried through the wind, followed by another at precisely the same interval.

Lion turned his head. "War drums?"

"Perhaps."

They walked, and the impacts continued. Eight beats, then silence. Guilliman counted through the pause, waiting for the next.

Another eight.

Khorne's number made the conclusion obvious enough that Guilliman distrusted it immediately. He had encountered too many traps built around the satisfaction of recognizing an answer.

The brass beneath their feet began to incline. Guilliman shortened his stride against the slippery metal.

A mountain rose through the storm ahead.

Skulls formed its slopes. Millions climbed into the bloody murk: human, Aeldari, Ork, Tau, and gleaming Necron crania. Others possessed arrangements of jaws and sockets he could give no name to. Some had been worn smooth by ages beyond reckoning; others still carried strips of flesh. Rivers of blood poured through their hollows and gathered in the mountain's gullies.

Lightning illuminated the summit. Something vast sat there. Guilliman glimpsed the suggestion of a throne, its towering back framing a pair of immense shoulders. Then the light failed, and the storm swallowed the mountain's upper reaches.

His grip tightened around the Sword. Fire stirred along its edge, gilding the teeth of the nearest skulls.

Lion stared toward the summit, blood streaming from his lowered shield.

"Do you believe that was him?"

"…I hope not."

His brother gave a humorless grunt, raised the Shield, and began climbing. Guilliman followed as the storm thickened. Blood streamed sideways or rose from the brass in twisting ropes. Far below, a great cataract poured upward into the clouds.

Every flash of lightning opened another battlefield around them.

Armored men hacked at one another with broken swords. World Eaters charged through walls of gunfire. Bare-skinned gladiators fought beneath a burning sun. Demon hosts crashed against armies whose standards hung empty and whose faces blurred beneath their helmets.

Guilliman watched one warrior decapitate another. As the severed head turned through the air, he recognized Angron's features. His gaze snapped back to the victor.

The same face looked down upon the corpse.

The next flash showed ten thousand of them. Another revealed a hundred thousand, fighting across a plain that stretched away beneath the mountain.

The storm closed. Guilliman kept his attention fixed upon his brother's back.

Eight. Pause. Eight.

The blows traveled through the brass and settled behind his ribs. Even during the pauses, his body waited for the next impact.

Another eight rolled across the battlefield.

The air changed. Guilliman smelled iron, smoke, and burned meat. Beneath them came the dry scent of sun-warmed sand.

He stopped. Lion took another step before realizing he had fallen behind. For one heartbeat, Guilliman stood beneath a burning sun. Sweat darkened worn leather. Blood soaked into pale earth, turning dust to a thick red paste.

Above it all lay the strange, clean smell of open sky.

Then the gale struck his armor, and brass rang beneath his shifting foot. The scent had vanished.

Lion turned toward him, angling the Shield to cover them both. "What?"

He gestured out towards the wastelands, the armies wearing Angron's face. "Nuceria."

His brother went very still. "You are certain?"

"No. But also yes."

Lion regarded him through the blood streaming down his face. "If you go mad, I will knock you out."

"If I do, I apologize in advance for whatever I do to you."

They resumed walking.

The rising brass leveled, then fractured with a deep metallic groan. Trenches opened across the plain, their walls bristling with chainaxes, swords, spears, and broken lasrifles. Guilliman recognized weapons from ages before either brother's birth. Others seemed to belong to wars yet to be fought. Bodies hung among the blades. Some wore the red and brass of the World Eaters; others bore chipped plates of blue and white. Unarmored men and women dangled beside them.

Guilliman slowed beside a woman impaled upon a spear. Dark hair hung across her scarred face. Her head had fallen forward, yet one hand remained closed around the worn hilt of a short sword. At her feet lay a burly dog, its broad body pinned beneath three spear shafts.

The grief tightening in his chest carried the certainty that Angron had known them both.

The storm screamed around them.

Eight. Pause. Eight.

The pounding vibrated through Guilliman's teeth. He set his jaw against it and followed the Lion along a narrow strip of brass between the trenches.

Ahead, his brother stopped and raised the Shield.

Something moved inside the crimson haze. Guilliman took it for another mountain until its vast flank rose with an indrawn breath. Clouds peeled away from a chest large enough to dwarf a Titan.

Wings unfolded through the storm, their membranes stretching between spars of bone until they blotted out the lightning. Horns rose like fortress spires. Chains thicker than hab-blocks hung from wrists and throat, their links disappearing into the red darkness.

Angron stood at the center of the storm.

The demon Primarch towered over the battlefield, a mass of red flesh and brass. Fire shone through wounds that opened and closed with each breath.

The Butcher's Nails climbed from his skull into the heavens.

His eyes opened. Hatred pressed across the plain with enough force to make Guilliman lean into it.

Lion lowered his stance beside him. "Brother."

Angron raised one arm through the clouds. The hand alone could have crushed a Knight. Guilliman brought the Sword up as Lion planted his feet and braced behind the Shield.

The hand descended: black claws, torn flesh, brass sunk deep into the knuckles. Guilliman locked his knees and waited for the weight to strike.

The hand passed through them.

Cold flooded his armor and sank through his flesh. Hatred followed, filling him so completely that he could taste it at the back of his throat.

Hatred of the Emperor. Hatred of Horus. Hatred of Lion beside him. Hatred of Koron. Hatred of Celestine.

Hatred of himself.

A universe compressed into the simple certainty that everything which lived deserved to bleed.

Then the hand was gone.

Guilliman dragged air into his lungs. The fury ebbed, leaving his muscles locked around a violence they had almost obeyed. He loosened his grip, then tightened it deliberately.

Above them, the phantom reared back and screamed into the heavens.

Lion tracked its flailing hands, his shield still raised. "It is a figment. Not what I expected."

"A psychological attack." Guilliman swallowed, working the lingering bitterness from his mouth. "I admit, I had not expected that of Khorne. But what do we do with it? Attack? Attempt to pass through?"

Lion gestured toward the monster's feet. "Look at the lake."

Beyond the last trench, the brass sloped into a lake of blood. Angron's hooves sent waves across its black surface, where the storm, skull mountains, and shattered sky moved in reflection.

White lines threaded Angron's reflection.

The lines persisted as the waves folded the image. A thousand fractures webbed the limbs, climbed the throat to the forehead, and gathered over the chest in a tangled blaze.

"What are you thinking?" he asked, already measuring the distance to the shore.

"Celestine said she saw cracks in the metaphysical walls. I say we hit those cracks and see what happens."

Guilliman looked from the reflection to the Sword. A fierce grin pulled at his mouth. "Agreed."

They descended to the lake. Blood splashed around Guilliman's first step; something crackled beneath his sole as he brought the other foot forward. Looking down, he saw the Sword and Shield burn brighter. Where their light fell, the blood darkened and stiffened beneath a spreading glaze. His next step landed upon ice, and fine cracks filled with gold beneath his weight.

The brothers shared a glance before they advanced side by side, freezing each approaching wave beneath their boots.

Angron's reflection remained caught within the stilled blood. Above them, the demon raged; beneath their feet, his fractured image lay fixed and immense.

At last they reached the reflected chest. Guilliman looked along the luminous web toward the skull, then turned to his brother.

"Head? Or heart?"

Lion considered both before he tapped one boot against the frozen blood over Angron's breast. "Heart."

"…Why?"

"Instinct. Do you have a better idea?"

Guilliman shook his head and stepped over the densest knot of fractures. He drew a deep breath, turned the Sword point down, and raised it above his head.

The blade plunged with all the strength he had left. Frozen blood shattered beneath its point.

Above them, Angron roared.

Fists and cloven hooves crashed through them, each passage flooding Guilliman with murderous wrath. His brother's presence became an intolerable provocation. The hilt in his hands offered a way to answer it.

He held the point down.

Beside him, Lion crouched behind the blazing Shield. Its light spread across the shattered surface, steady beneath the passing shadows of Angron's limbs.

Golden fire raced from the Sword into the white fractures. It poured through them in branching veins until the reflected chest burned like shattered glass beneath the lake.

Guilliman drove harder. The blade sank another inch, then another, dragging a low grinding sound from whatever lay beneath the blood. Resistance gathered around the steel. The substance of the demon-shell tightened against it, gripping the blade along its buried length.

Guilliman's shoulders bunched beneath his armor. Sweat ran from his brow and stung his eyes. He braced his boots farther apart, locked both hands around the hilt, and leaned his full weight onto the weapon.

The Sword had stopped.

"Brother—!"

"Move!"

Guilliman twisted aside, snatching his hands clear as Lion stepped in. Both gauntlets closed around the rim of the Shield. His brother raised it above his head and brought it down upon the Sword's pommel like a siege hammer.

The impact shook the world.

Blood flashed solid for fifty meters in every direction, arresting the waves in jagged ridges. A golden shockwave tore through the reflected fractures, and the Sword punched half a foot deeper into Angron's chest.

The giant above them screamed. The sound rolled across the battlefield, bending the brass horizon and sending whole slopes of skulls tumbling into the haze.

Guilliman stared at the buried blade, then at the Shield, then at his brother. "Again!"

Lion gave a low chuckle, raised the Shield, and met Angron's enormous fist as it descended through the clouds. Heat and hatred swept through them. Guilliman's hands clenched, every instinct demanding that he turn upon the warrior beside him. Through that blinding instant, he watched Lion keep his gaze fixed upon the pommel.

The Shield struck again. The Sword was driven deeper.

His brother struck again. Cracks split the reflection, and golden fire poured through Angron's chest. Each blow rattled Lion's battered armor as he hauled the Shield back into position.

The storm howled around them. Eight distant impacts rolled across the battlefield, followed by the familiar pause. Then Lion's next blow shook the lake.

For several moments, Guilliman lost all sense of where one rhythm ended and the other began. Two impacts sounded from somewhere deeper within the storm. His brother's strike answered them. The distant cadence continued, steady beneath the ringing of the Shield against the pommel.

Two hammers, working against one another.

The thought chilled him.

Guilliman slid forward onto one knee, keeping his body beside the arc of the Shield. He closed both hands around the lower part of the hilt, leaving the pommel exposed, and dragged it toward him.

The blade resisted. Beneath the ice, the burning fractures stretched.

Lion struck again. Guilliman felt the impact through his wrists and pulled harder, working the Emperor's blade like the universe's most ornate crowbar.

He planted his boots wide and took the strain.

"Now!"

Another hammerblow, another inch—

Then something tore.

The sound was nothing like the wet rip of flesh, or the clean snap of metal. It carried the brittle shriek of splitting glass, the groan of ancient stone, and beneath, both a human scream stretched so thin it had almost become silence.

The crack widened, and the Lion dropped the Shield and thrust his fingers into the opening. His gauntlets sank past the edges as though Angron's chest were made from smoke held together by will. He braced, planting his boots against the far edge of the tear.

Guilliman forced the hilt down toward the lake, levering the buried blade against the edge of the tear. Across from him, Lion leaned back and pulled. His boots scraped furrows through the ice before finding purchase.
Golden fire flooded the opening. Guilliman's arms shook as the shell yielded another fraction. His brother pulled harder.

Together, with the sheer stubbornness of brothers marching through hell, they ripped the demon-shell open.

The battlefield twisted. Mountains of skulls folded inward. Rivers of blood climbed into the sky. The horizon buckled, and the phantom Angron convulsed as the wound in his reflected chest tore wider.

His scream followed the collapsing landscape into the storm.

Guilliman held the Sword down until the resistance suddenly slackened. Across the breach, Lion staggered back a step, torn wisps of red trailing from his gauntlets.

Darkness opened beneath their feet.

Cold seeped through the joints of Guilliman's armor. He drew the Sword free and held its burning length over the opening. The light reached a little way before fading. Around the breach, the Bloodstorm's roar dulled. Stillness swallowed the gale until Guilliman could hear his own breathing and the scrape of the Shield as Lion retrieved it.

Then came a single impact.

THOOM.

Guilliman froze at the edge.

THOOM.

The second settled deep within his chest. Six more followed. During the pause, he could still feel them in his teeth.

Lion stood beside him. Far below, a pale white light gathered within the darkness.

Something moved within it.

Lion just gave Guilliman a shrug and leapt in.

Guilliman's hand rose too late to catch his brother's shoulder. He allowed himself a moment's exasperation at his brother's recklessness before following him in. The world tilted, vertical becoming horizontal somewhere between the leap and the landing. The Warp's relationship with physics remained as combative as ever.

Then he looked up, and the disorientation ceased to matter.

The light became a pillar that stood within the void, enclosed by a translucent film that trembled beneath four immense skeletal arms. Blood ran along their bones as their hands reached through the pillar's base.

A fifth arm circled the light, its dripping hand bearing a hammer of brass, bone, and black iron. It swung through the barrier and struck something beneath it.

A brass nail.

Guilliman's gaze followed the shaft into the broad, scarred back of his brother.

Hundreds more bristled from Angron's body, piercing his joints and tendons. Skeletal hands enclosed his limbs from wrist to shoulder, ankle to thigh. The nails occupied every place from which he might have begun to move.

Through a gap in the skeletal fingers, Guilliman saw Angron's forefinger twitch against a nail driven through its first joint.

The hammer-hand wheeled about with a terrifying speed.

THOOM.

The blow struck that single nail. A shockwave passed through Guilliman's armor as the brass punched deeper into the white.

Angron grunted.

His head remained fixed against the floor. Great nails through his neck and spine shivered with the impact.

Guilliman's gaze moved lower, following the faint movement of his brother's mouth. Angron's jaw remained free.

"Why?" Lion asked. His brother's eyes had lowered toward Angron's mouth. "Everything else is restrained."

Understanding arrived slowly, carrying a sickness that settled beneath Guilliman's ribs.

THOOM.

Beneath the hammerblow, he could almost hear Khorne's whisper.

Yield.

"…So he could surrender."

Lion moved before Guilliman had finished speaking. He stepped into the hammer's path and raised the Shield.

"No—!"

The warning vanished beneath the impact. Golden light crashed against blood-red fire and threw the skeletal hand backward. Cracks flashed across the convulsing darkness. The hammer returned with the next beat. Lion met it squarely, knees bending beneath the force, and hurled it back in a burst of golden light. He pivoted beneath the next descending blow.

"Free him!"

Nodding, Guilliman pressed a gauntlet against the barrier. It yielded beneath his palm, light as gossamer and thin as hope. The membrane parted around his hand, arm, and shoulder. He stepped through, and it sealed behind him.

Angron's ragged voice rose from the floor.

"Roboute. Lion. What are you bastards doing here?"

"Ang—"

Guilliman stopped beside his brother's head. His hand hovered, searching for somewhere he could touch without pressing upon a nail.

What could he say? What could he possibly say to his brother, here and now?

Koron's words settled into his thoughts with the weight of lead.

Choice.

"Come to kill me, did you?" Guilliman could hear the smile Angron lacked the freedom to turn and show him. "Ten thousand years overdue, brother."

A thousand arguments crowded forward. He could speak of duty and family, revenge and freedom. He could invoke the Emperor, the Imperium, the countless lives Angron might yet save.

He discarded them in turn. Each explained why he wanted Angron to leave, what place he imagined his brother occupying in whatever came afterward.

For once, the question had to belong entirely to Angron.

It was not the Emperor that came to mind as Guilliman sought an answer.

Rather, it was his father, Konor.

The man who had taught him how to govern, and instilled in him reasons why anyone should be permitted to govern at all.

What would my father do?

The answer was almost embarrassingly simple.

He lowered himself beside Angron's head and planted the Sword point-first in the pale surface. With his free hand, he released Lion's borrowed helm and pulled it from his sweat-matted hair. Cold touched his bruised face. He bent closer so his brother could hear his unfiltered voice.

"I am sorry, brother."

Angron went still. Even the faint movements of his fingers ceased.

Beyond the barrier, the hammer crashed against the Shield.

THOOM.

"For what?"

Guilliman swallowed. Too many answers crowded behind his teeth: Nuceria, the Emperor, ten thousand years of suffering. Every occasion on which he had reduced his brother's agony to a problem of strategy.

"For being such a bastard."

Silence held for half a heartbeat before Angron managed a strangled, wheezing chuff that might have been laughter.

"Is that how you see it?"

"Yes. You were right about some things. Wrong about others, but…"

"If this is a confessional, kill me now," Angron spat. "I am nailed to the floor. Spare me your self-flagellation."

Guilliman closed his mouth, a grim smile tugging at his lips. Even now, with his brother pinned facedown to the floor of his own soul, he had somehow found a way to begin giving a speech.

Konor would have laughed at him. Tarasha might have smacked him.

"Fair enough."

Angron grunted.

Guilliman looked across the thousands of brass nails and the golden light flaring as Lion caught another blow. He leaned closer.

"Do you want to leave?"

Metal grated as Angron forced his head sideways, far enough to fix one pale-blue eye upon Guilliman.

"Fucking obviously." He spat a clot of pink saliva onto the white beneath him. "But if my choices are continued existence like this, a slave collar to the golden bastard, or death? Drive that blade through my heart and be done with it."

Guilliman laid a hand against his battered breastplate.

"I swear, by whatever value it has to you, I will not put a collar around your neck. I will not see you in chains once more."

"Then what?" Angron's eye flicked toward the Lion, following a flash of gold through the trembling barrier. "Speak quickly. He is drawing closer."

At the furthest edge of Guilliman's vision, red light began to gather in the black.

"Join us. Return to Chaos, if that is truly what you choose. Or leave both behind and never deal with either of us again. I cannot promise you will never face foes from the Imperium, but I promise that my hand will never sign the order, and my voice will never give the command."

For a moment, Angron's eye held a light Guilliman knew too well. He had seen it in his own reflection every day he erased the old number and wrote a new one, counting down until the Armor of Fate could finally be removed.

Hope.

In its terrible pain, and all its incalculable power.

Angron wetted his cracked lips. "I will not become your weapon. I will not follow him. I. Will. Not."

"I know."

Guilliman stood, secured the borrowed helm at his hip, and reclaimed the Sword. He worked its burning edge beneath the head of the first brass nail protruding from Angron's neck.

The metal yielded. Guilliman levered the nail from his brother's spine in a quick, brutal motion. Angron's entire body shuddered.

"Are—"

"Keep going, damn you! Pain is something I am well used to! But he's getting close!"

Guilliman set the blade beneath the next nail and glanced toward the horizon, and the gathering light. Red stained a broad sweep of darkness. Beneath the hammerblows came a footstep grinding through bone.

"Shit."

He worked down Angron's spine. Each nail came free with a jolt, releasing another rigid section of his brother's back. Muscles shifted beneath scarred skin as his shoulders strained against the hands holding them.

Guilliman turned the Sword and swept it through the skeletal wrist pinning his brother's right arm.

A shriek tore through the void. The severed fingers loosened, and Angron wrenched his shoulder sideways.

Around them, the barrier flickered. Its white light thinned, allowing more of the distant red to show through.

"Hurry!" Angron shouted.

His back arched. One nail bent, then another, as he hauled against the restraints. Guilliman realized with a jolt that Angron was no longer waiting to be freed.

He was helping.

"Whatever this barrier is, it's failing!"

THOOM.

Beyond the membrane, Lion skidded three meters, caught himself, and hurled his body beneath the hammer's next stroke. "It grows frantic!" he shouted over the pressure wave. "Whatever you are doing, do more of it!"

Guilliman raced down Angron's right arm, prying nails from elbow, wrist, and fingers. Angron clenched his freed fist twice, rolled the shoulder, and planted his palm against the floor. His chest lifted. The muscles of his arm and back knotted as he seized one of the bloody fingerbones trapping his left arm. Cracks spread beneath his grip.

Guilliman hacked through the skeletal wrist. The instant it parted, Angron tore the hand away and hurled it through the barrier into the void. The Sword was already moving toward the nails beneath it. Guilliman worked from shoulder to fingertips as the distant blood-light swelled. Immense armored boots moved within the haze.

Angron's gasping drew his attention back. Sweat streamed along the scars of Angron's chest. His freed hand shook beneath his weight, but whenever Guilliman loosened a nail, Angron wrenched it the rest of the way out.

Together they reached his legs.

Guilliman severed the skeletal arms. Angron caught the nail through one knee in both hands and hauled it free with a roar. They tore the nails from his thighs and ankles, Guilliman cutting and levering while Angron pulled. At last his brother dragged his legs beneath him and stood. Shorter shafts still protruded from his body. He swayed, caught his balance, and pointed toward the spreading red glare.

"Leave the rest! We don't have time, and I can run!"

"They might remain anchors!"

Angron bared his teeth. "…Damn it. Fine!"

They bent to the remaining nails. Angron ripped free those he could reach while Guilliman worked along the other leg. Each left a dark puncture in scarred flesh.

The last nail fell between them.

For one strange second, Angron stared down at his feet. His toes curled against the white surface, then spread again. A small, startled grin crossed his face.

He shook himself free of the distracting thought. "We have got to go!" He managed three steps before his leg buckled beneath him, both arms slamming into the white barrier beneath. "Damn it!" Tremors raced through him as he tried to rise.

Guilliman held out his hand. The blue plating of his gauntlet was broken and smeared with blood, dirt, and fragments of bone.

Angron looked at it, then gripped his brother's hand.

Guilliman pulled him upright and ducked beneath his arm, taking his brother's weight across his shoulders. He tightened his hold and turned toward the gold flashing beyond the failing barrier.

"We are leaving!"

---

Koron flattened himself behind a pillar of flesh and bone as the Bloodstorm swelled.

The hurricane doubled in breadth with such violence that the world seemed to lurch beneath it. Wind seized him by the armor and dragged him sideways through the muck, his body carving trenches through blood and mud. He fired both grapples into the earth. Their anchors punched through meat, shattered buried stone, and caught. The lines snapped taut hard enough to sing.

Fifteen feet away, Abaddon had driven Drach'nyen through the arena floor. The Warmaster leaned his full weight against its hilt, the Talon raised across his face as chunks of the arena tore free and burst against his armor.

Across the battlefield, Mortarion and Celestine had abandoned their fight entirely.

Both clung to the living wall, weapons buried deep into its flesh, free hands hooked around jutting ribs and exposed bone. Mortarion's ragged wings folded tight against his back. Celestine's blood-soaked feathers streamed behind her, flattened almost to silver-red ribbons by the gale.

Then the storm struck them all, as a concussive wave burst from its heart.

Koron's shield flashed blue-white around him, the impact hammering through armor and field alike. His organs seemed to shift inside him despite the protection.

Another wave followed.

Then another.

Three more came in quick, broken succession, each arriving without rhythm or warning. The ground split beneath Koron's grapples. Mud, bone and shattered stone fled the center of the arena in great sheets. A section of the living wall tore loose and collapsed beneath its own weight, spilling flesh and broken ribs across the earth in a wet avalanche.

'Field geometry is destabilizing!' Sasha shouted.

'Good destabilizing?!'

'What the hell do you think?! Twenty-four seconds before the Gellar field dies!'

Koron stared into the screaming red wall.

'They'll make it!'

'Koron—!'

'They will make it!'

Scarlet lightning split the hurricane.

For an instant, something vast stood within it.

Wings filled the storm. Horns cut black shapes against the lightning. A towering body moved behind curtains of blood, and its roar passed through Koron's armor, through his ribs, through his teeth.

Two enormous red arms thrust from the cyclone.

Clawed hands struck the arena floor.

Stone burst beneath them. Furrows opened beneath talons longer than swords as the creature hauled itself toward the edge of the storm.

Koron's mouth went dry.

Beside him, Abaddon turned, his face splitting into a victorious grin. "It appears your gamble did not pay off!"

Koron did not look at him. "Come on!" he whispered.

The numbers burned in the corner of his vision.

Twelve seconds.

The red arms strained. Muscles like bundled cables flexed beneath skin the color of fresh blood as the shape behind them dragged itself farther from the hurricane.

"Come on!"

Six seconds.

Koron pressed both forearms into the muck. His grapples groaned. His jaw ached from the force of his clenched teeth.

"Come! On!"

One second.

The alarm sounded.

Red warnings flooded his vision.

The Gellar field died.

There was no thunder to mark its passing. No explosion. No flash of divine significance.

A power source simply reached the end of its life, and one of the only things standing between Angron and a god ceased to exist.

Koron curled his hands into fists and swallowed the shout clawing at his throat.

Then Angron came through the storm.

The demon's face pushed from the hurricane, vast and twisted beneath crown-like horns. Wind tore at his wings as he dragged himself forward. His mouth hung open, and from it came a cry that had long since passed beyond rage.

Abaddon's grin faltered, for his gaze followed the demon's progress.

Then lifted toward its face.

Uncertainty entered the Warmaster's eyes.

Angron was not striding from the Bloodstorm in triumph, the broken bodies of the Primarchs in hand.

He crawled.

His limbs shook beneath him.

Pain contorted every line of his enormous face.

Then the demon reared backward with a sickening jerk.

Its tail lashed across the rubble. Both hands flew to its chest, claws scraping frantically over the seams of its breastplate as a ululating scream poured from its throat.

The claws found purchase, sinking into flesh. Black blood welled around them and was torn away by the gale before a single drop could fall.

A crack split the world.

For a sharp instant, it drowned the hurricane.

Koron flinched.

A second impact came.

Angron lurched backward as something struck his chest from within.

His breastplate bulged outward.

Metal shrieked.

Abaddon's eyes widened.

The third blow came like judgment.

The golden point of the Emperor's Sword burst through the center of Angron's chest.

The demon stared down at it, its red eyes bulging nearly out of their sockets.

Both hands closed around the blade, trying desperately to force it back into the wound. Smoke poured from between its fingers. Golden flame licked across its palms. Flesh blackened and split around the holy fire.

Still the Sword came.

Then came the fourth blow.

Koron felt it before he heard it.

There was force within that impact, yet force was only a shadow of it. Something moved through the Warp that his instruments could not name, his mathematics could not reduce, and six threads of thought could not place inside any category he possessed.

A choice fulfilled.

A chain, broken.

A story, tilted.

Whatever it was, the demon could not withstand it.

Its chest split open.

Crimson essence streamed from the wound in long twisting ribbons, spiraling upward into the storm. Scarlet lightning crawled along the torn edges of flesh and brass. Cracks spread through armor, muscle and horn as the opening widened.

Something moved within the golden glare.

Blue armor emerged first.

Green beside it.

And between them—

Pale.

Human.

Three men pushed through the wound.

The Lion came first, the Shield angled against the storm, golden light pouring from its battered rim as blood and debris broke around him.

Guilliman followed at his side.

Between them stumbled a third figure.

Broad, scarred, and bare to the waist.

Guilliman had one arm locked beneath his shoulder, bearing part of his weight. When the man's knees buckled, the Avenging Son tightened his grip and hauled him onward.

Step by step, the three brothers came out of hell.

Behind them, the demon reached.

Its great hand scraped across the broken earth, fingers stretching toward the man who had once filled its skin.

Angron stopped.

For a moment, he simply hung there between his brothers, bloody and sweating, every breath dragging visibly through his chest.

The Nails hanging from his skull clicked against one another in the dying wind.

Slowly, he turned.

He looked back at the thing that had worn his rage for ten thousand years.

The demon's claws trembled against the shattered stone. Its ruined face twisted as it reached toward him, and upon that vast countenance appeared an expression Koron had never imagined he would see upon anything born of the Blood God.

Desperation.

And beneath it—

Fear.

Angron spat into the dirt.

"Fuck. You."

Then, leaning heavily on his brothers, he turned his back upon it and walked away.

The first fracture split across the demon's fingers.

Another followed.

Cracks raced up the outstretched hand like white fire beneath glass, crossing the wrist, climbing the arm, spreading across shoulder and breast until the colossal form was webbed from within. Flesh parted. Brass split. Plates of impossible armor peeled away from one another as the thing that had surrounded Angron began to lose the story that had held it together.

The arm came apart first, breaking into great fragments that dissolved before they could strike the earth. Red flesh became drifting ash. Brass collapsed into sparks. Warp essence streamed upward in twisting ribbons, drawn screaming into a sky that no longer wished to hold it.

The fracture reached the demon's heart.

For one last moment, it stood beneath the storm like some ancient idol cast down before the eyes of an unbelieving world.

Softly, quietly, Khorne's demon died.

The hurricane died with it.

The change came too quickly for nature.

One heartbeat, the Bloodstorm still towered above the arena, its walls roaring high into the poisoned heavens.

The next, its great rotation faltered.

The wind stumbled.

Debris that had circled overhead lost its momentum and fell. Broken weapons clattered against stone. Chunks of the world plunged into the arena. Bones struck the mud like hail. Koron's grapple lines, drawn taut enough to sing beneath the gale, sagged suddenly against the ruined ground.

Silence did not come.

The arena was too broken for silence.

Stone collapsed. Metal shrieked. The wounded cried out. Fires crackled where blood had begun to steam.

Yet after the endless howl of the storm, it felt close enough.

Koron slowly raised his head.

Above him, the greater Warp storm was coming apart.

Scarlet lightning flickered once, twice, then vanished into the retreating dark. Great wounds of blue opened across the heavens, widening as the unnatural cloud banks fled from one another.

Sunlight touched Vigilus.

It spilled through the broken sky in broad golden shafts, crossing the ruined arena, shining upon shattered armor, torn banners, blood-blackened stone and mountains of the dead.

For the first time in nearly two days, Koron felt the warmth of a sun upon his skin.

He closed his eyes for half a heartbeat. Then opened them.

No one else was looking at the sky.

Abaddon stood beside Drach'nyen, one hand still resting upon the blade where he had driven it into the earth to anchor himself. The Warmaster had gone utterly still.

Across the arena, Celestine and Mortarion had forgotten one another.

The Living Saint clung to the wall with her sword buried deep into the flesh beneath her hand, silver eyes fixed upon the clearing at the center of the battlefield.

Mortarion stared as though the universe had spoken a word he did not understand.

Before them stood three brothers.

Guilliman held the Emperor's Sword at his side. Its golden flame burned clean beneath the newborn blue of the sky, every lick of fire impossibly bright against his battered armor.

Lion El'Jonson stood beside him, the Shield raised against the last rain of falling debris. Golden light traced its scarred rim and glimmered across the blood streaking his plate.

And between them stood Angron.

His back cast no winged shadow.

His skull bore neither horn nor crown.

His scarred chest rose and fell with mortal breath, emptied of its furnace.

He stood upon two trembling legs, naked to the waist, pale skin crossed by scars older than some world's history. Blood and sweat ran in thin streams down the hard planes of his body. The Butcher's Nails hung from his skull and clicked softly against one another in the dying wind.

One hand remained locked around Guilliman's forearm.

He needed the support. He did not hide that he needed it.

Angron looked slowly around the arena.

At the dead.

At the living.

At the traitors.

At the loyalists.

At the impossible blue sky spreading above them.

Then his gaze found the servo-skulls.

One by one, the little machines steadied themselves in the weakening air. Their suspensors whined as they corrected their positions. Lenses rotated. Auspex arrays clicked into focus.

They were still broadcasting.

Across Vigilus, across the fleets above it, perhaps farther still, untold eyes were watching.

Angron saw them.

And grinned.

It was no demon's rictus.

It was the grin of a gladiator standing in the sand after the chains had fallen from his wrists.

Still gripping Guilliman for balance, Angron raised his free arm.

Slowly at first.

Then higher.

His fist closed beneath the open sky.

He threw back his head.

And roared.

The sound rolled across the arena like thunder.

It swept over the dead and the living alike, over broken walls and shattered banners, over saints and monsters and the watching gods.

There were no words in it.

None were needed.

For ten thousand years, Khorne had named him slave, champion, weapon.

For ten thousand years, the galaxy had named him traitor, monster, demon.

Now, beneath the sun, Angron named himself.

And the whole fucking galaxy heard him.

 

[BuilderOne]

Nice. So Angron is now free,and he can potentially lead a new neutral enclave (somewhat bounded to the Imperium, but not a part of it). Interested to see further developments.

 

[Talon88.1]

Nice. So Angron is now free,and he can potentially lead a new neutral enclave (somewhat bounded to the Imperium, but not a part of it). Interested to see further developments.

Click to shrink...

Free in one sense, very much so.
Free in other senses, very much not so.
Poor bastards got a long road ahead of him.

 

[Talon88.1]

Chapter Seventy-Six

---

Reminder dear listeners, the Voxbox remains open at all times!

---

Angron's roar was still rolling away across the battlefield when his gaze shifted.

The last echoes rebounded from broken armor, shattered stone, and the blackened shells of war machines before fading beneath the distant thunder of artillery. Around them, the arena remained a ruin of churned earth and fractured masonry, smoke drifting in ragged sheets beneath a sky that had only moments before been drowned in blood-red storm clouds.

Guilliman followed his brother's stare.

Abaddon stood amid the wreckage several dozen meters away, his black armor scorched, gouged, and powdered with bone dust. Drach'nyen remained planted point-first in the earth beside him, the demon blade's warped surface catching the restored sunlight.

For once, the Warmaster simply stared.

Angron slowly lowered his fist. His hand spread across his bare, scarred chest, fingertips brushing flesh that had not existed an hour before. His expression twisted. Scarred lips peeled back from his teeth as his pale blue eyes remained fixed upon Abaddon.

"While I may not be taking your side," he said, glancing down toward Guilliman, "I did make a promise regarding him."

He bent, even though his knee trembled beneath his enormous weight. His balance wavered for the barest instant before his fingers drove into the fractured stone at his feet. Rock cracked beneath his grip. Angron tore free a fist-sized chunk of masonry and slowly straightened, dust spilling from between his fingers.

"Angron," Guilliman began. "You are in no condition—"

"Roboute, shut up." Angron tossed the stone once in his palm and caught it. "I'm going to go cave his face in."

He took two steps toward the Warmaster before his snarl vanished.

The stone slipped from suddenly nerveless fingers and struck the ground with a dull clack as both hands flew to his skull.

Angron's fingers buried themselves in his scalp hard enough to tear skin beneath his nails. His mouth opened, but for one terrible second no sound emerged. Every muscle in his body locked at once, cords standing rigid along his neck and shoulders.

Guilliman moved before thought could catch up.

He caught Angron beneath one arm as his brother's knees buckled, nearly dragged down with him by the sudden dead weight of the Primarch's enormous frame.

The scream came a heartbeat later, a raw, human sound born from a throat that no longer held a demon's heat.

Lion was already moving. He stepped between them and Abaddon without a word, Fealty rising into guard as the Shield locked into place before him. Sunlight flashed across the stained gold of its surface.

Angron's pale blue eyes snapped toward Guilliman.

There was no fury in them now.

Only confusion, and pain so profound that for an instant Guilliman saw not the Red Angel, not the butcher of worlds, but a man who genuinely did not understand why his own body had turned against him.

Blood stained Angron's teeth. A dark line ran from the corner of his mouth where he had bitten through his tongue.

"Why?!" he ground out.

Guilliman's stomach dropped.

A thin thread of blood slipped from one nostril. Then another appeared beneath Angron's eye. Then his ears.

Guilliman half turned while still supporting his brother's weight and roared across the battlefield with enough force to carry over the guns.

"KORON!"

Air cracked beside him.

Dust jumped outward in a tight ring as Koron appeared, armor battered, helmet still sealed over his face. He stumbled half a step from the abrupt translation, caught himself, and immediately slapped one metal hand against Angron's shoulder.

"Don't worry, I anticipated—"

He froze.

"Oh fuck."

Guilliman stared at him. "What do you mean by that?"

Angron's leg convulsed. The movement was brutally fast. Guilliman's left arm shot downward and caught the Primarch's knee before it could drive through Koron's upper body. The impact slammed through his gauntlet and jolted all the way into his shoulder.

"I'll explain later!"

Koron braced himself against Angron's arm. A needle snapped from the heel of his palm and punched through the flesh of the Primarch's bicep.

Silver flooded beneath the skin. "Sorry about this," Koron said rapidly, "but your body has apparently decided to kill you, so I need everything to stop for a while!"

Angron's bloodshot eyes found him.

For a moment, Koron simply stared back through the opaque front of his helmet.

Then his shoulders drew in slightly.

"Take a nap," he said. "Hate me later."

Three seconds. Guilliman counted every one.

Angron's breathing hitched. The terrible rigidity in his limbs began to loosen. His fingers slipped from his scalp, leaving bloody crescents behind, and his enormous frame finally sagged against Guilliman.

Koron kept one hand pressed against Angron's shoulder. His helmet remained motionless, but Guilliman knew information would be pouring across the inside of the visor faster than any unaugmented mind could follow.

A few seconds later, Koron's posture eased by a fraction. "Okay. He's stabilizing." Koron looked up at him. "But we need to get him to a proper medical facility soon."

Guilliman groaned as he forced himself upright, one gauntleted hand braced against his knee. Something in his back popped loudly enough that he nearly winced.

His armor felt as though it had doubled in weight. Blood, oil, and hydraulic fluid had worked their way through rents in the plate and pooled inside his boots, sloshing unpleasantly around his feet whenever he moved. Every joint protested. His ribs ached.

Still, he raised the Sword.

Golden flame rolled along the blade, its warmth washing over his battered face and chasing away, for just a moment, the stink of blood, ozone, and burned flesh.

Guilliman leveled its point toward Abaddon. "One more push, then."

He took a step, and stopped.

Neither Abaddon nor Mortarion had moved.

Both were staring at Angron.

For several long seconds, neither seemed capable of looking anywhere else. The battlefield smoldered around them. Fires crawled through shattered fortifications. Broken armor lay scattered among craters and pools of cooling blood. Above it all, beneath a sky impossibly blue after the passing of the Bloodstorm, Angron lay unconscious between his brothers.

No wings, horns, nor brass buried through mountains of red flesh.

Only a man.

An immense one, scarred beyond imagining, his skin pale beneath streaks of blood and dust, but unmistakably human.

After ten thousand years, the Red Angel was gone.

At last, Mortarion raised his head.

His breath rasped through his respirator in a wet, gurgling wheeze. Green-yellow vapor leaked around the edges of his mask and curled across his shoulders.

"That…" His voice sounded almost distant. "...is impossible."

Lion glanced down at the unconscious Angron, then back toward Mortarion.

"Apparently not."

Abaddon, however, had a different question.

His attention rested neither upon Guilliman nor Lion. Not upon Mortarion, nor even upon the Living Saint hovering above the battlefield with battered wings spread behind her, her shadow stretching across the Imperials below.

No.

Abaddon was staring at the little mortal kneeling beside Angron.

At Koron, whose metal hand remained pressed against the fallen Primarch's shoulder.

Abaddon's lips parted. The question was plainly there, burning behind his eyes, waiting to be given voice.

Then the war reminded them all that it was not finished. Weapons fire cracked across the field. The Chaos warhost had finally recovered from its collective shock. Warriors dragged themselves from broken formations. Engines growled back to life. Officers screamed orders through corrupted vox-grilles as thousands of eyes turned toward the impossible tableau in the center of the battlefield.

Whatever theological ramifications Angron's restoration might have carried could apparently wait. The servants of Chaos returned to the problem-solving method they understood best.

Kill everyone involved. Sort it out later.

Las-fire, plasma, mass-reactive shells, and streams of incandescent energy ripped into the advancing demon ranks. Behind them came the Traitor Astartes, shield-bearing warriors closing ranks in the gaps between snarling Predators and squat Vindicators. Tracks ground rubble into the mud as the armored line crawled forward.

Tank guns thundered, the air punched inward with every discharge. Shells hammered against Mechanicus force fields in blooms of tortured light, while others smashed into hastily erected walls and threw slabs of ferrocrete spinning into the air.

Gabriel's voice burst across the vox, tension pulled so tightly through his words that his attempt at professionalism became almost impressive. "My lord, while I appreciate the events of the day, I highly suggest that we get out of here."

Guilliman glanced toward Lion.

His brother gave a single nod.

Guilliman shifted his weight onto his right leg, ignoring the fresh complaint from somewhere in his knee, and raised the Sword once more.

"Celestine, Mortarion. Koron, portal. Brother, brother."

Lion disappeared, and for the briefest instant the battlefield smelled of rain. Cool air brushed Guilliman's scorched armor. Shadows gathered around his brother, carrying with them the whisper of wet leaves and distant forests. Fealty vanished into its sheath somewhere between one heartbeat and the next.

Then Lion stood beside Angron with the Shield already raised. He caught their unconscious brother beneath the shoulders and knees as though lifting a wounded soldier rather than a Primarch, and shadow swallowed them both.

A heartbeat later, startled cries erupted from behind the Imperial line.

Lion emerged beside the Grey Knights' whirling portal, rainwater still gleaming briefly across his armor before evaporating into the battlefield heat. Several nearby Astartes recoiled before recognizing him, while a trio of Mechanicus adepts abruptly scattered from his path.

Waiting beside the portal was a wounded, one-armed Custodial Dreadnought.

Lion placed Angron into its remaining arm with surprising care. Then he rested one enormous hand against the Dreadnought's faceplate. "If anything happens to him, you will be the first one I speak with."

There was a brief silence as the ancient warrior inside considered Lion's phrasing. "Understood, Primarch." The Dreadnought immediately turned and entered the portal, oils leaking steadily from the ruin of its severed limb.

Above the battlefield, Celestine and Mortarion collided again.

Gold-white flame struck pus-rotted plague light in a burst bright enough to cast hard shadows across the broken ground. Their weapons met with a shriek of tortured metal. Sparks and gobbets of decayed flesh scattered together through the air.

Celestine wheeled around Mortarion in tight, darting arcs, silver hair whipping behind her as her wings snapped open and closed. She was too quick for the ponderous sweeps of Silence, slipping around the scythe's edge by inches before answering with burning cuts of her own.

Mortarion swept one hand outward.

A cloud of bloatflies erupted from the folds of his armor, accompanied by fat white maggots and things with too many wings. They poured after Celestine in a buzzing, writhing mass.

She twisted in midair as golden fire exploded from both hands, consuming the swarm in a greasy flash.

Koron, meanwhile, had disappeared.

Guilliman added that problem to the rapidly growing list of things he intended to worry about later.

Abaddon charged.

The Warmaster came across the broken ground like an avalanche in black plate, Drach'nyen trailing darkness behind it as he drew the blade back for a cut that would have opened Guilliman from hip to shoulder.

Guilliman brought the Sword in line. Then forced the pain of—well, everything—into some distant corner of his mind.

Abaddon swung.

The world flashed blue, and Guilliman's stomach attempted to remain behind.

Reality snapped back into place.

Blinking, he realized he was standing beside the portal.

Something small dropped from his back and struck the ground behind him with a metallic clatter.

He half turned in time to see Koron release his grip on Guilliman's power pack and land unsteadily on both feet. Realization dawned. It was the same move from the spire while Angron tried to kill them. "Why did you not do that earlier?"

"Warp was fucking with my teleport. Can do it now. Excuse me!"

Koron vanished. Across the battlefield, blue distortion snapped into existence beside Celestine. Koron appeared several meters above the ground, seized her forearm, and vanished with her before gravity had time to object.

They reappeared beside the portal, where Koron released her immediately.

Celestine staggered half a step away, her face pinched with pain. Faint curls of smoke rose from the place where his metal fingers had closed around her armor, accompanied by the acrid smell of scorched cloth and heated metal.

Guilliman wasted no time questioning it.

"Through the portal! Everyone, now!"

His roar rolled across the battlefield, drowning engines, weapons fire, and shouted oaths alike.

The retreat began at once.

Astartes from every Chapter represented in orbit peeled away by formation rather than breaking ranks. The smallest contingents withdrew first, disappearing into the whirling silver-blue depths of the Grey Knights' portal while heavier formations collapsed inward around them. Terminators and Gravis-armored warriors anchored the shrinking perimeter. Dreadnoughts walked backward beneath sheets of incoming fire, weapons barking as they covered the withdrawal.

A line folding upon itself one disciplined step at a time.

Abaddon and Mortarion had no intention of allowing it.

They crossed the battlefield from opposite directions, converging upon the withdrawing Imperials with blade, scythe, shadow, and plague.

Guilliman stepped forward to meet them.

Lion appeared beside him in a whisper of rain and shadow, the Shield rising between them.

Celestine's wings spread overhead, a welcome warmth.

Somewhere behind them, space flickered as Koron disappeared again.

Blade met shield.

Flame met plague.

And almost immediately, the two champions of Chaos began to give ground.

Lion anchored the Imperial line.

He stood at its center like the fixed point of a wheel, the Shield in constant motion. Bolter shells burst against its face in sprays of hot metal. Plague-spawned filth hissed into steam upon its gilded surface. Every threat that might have broken the retreat met that wall of gold first, and every time Lion turned it aside with the tireless precision of a machine built for war and sharpened by ten thousand years of absence.

Celestine ruled the air above him.

White-gold fire streamed from her hands and blade alike, each pass of her wings trailing drifting sparks through the smoky dusk of the battlefield. She harried Mortarion from above in cutting arcs, never where he expected, never where he wanted her, forcing the Plague Primarch to swing upward through empty air while holy flame burned through his rot-slick vapors and turned clouds of flies into ash.

Guilliman kept himself beside Lion.

His body begged him for collapse. His armor felt half full of blood and broken glass. Even breathing had become labor. He gave none of it the dignity of attention. The Sword remained in his grasp, and he conserved what strength he had left for the moments that mattered most: the opening in Abaddon's guard, the overextension of Mortarion's stance, the heartbeat when a killing stroke might become possible.

Koron, meanwhile, became a problem no battlefield could comfortably contain.

He flickered from place to place in sudden displacements, appearing beside the wounded long enough to teleport them closer to the portal before vanishing again. One instant he was crouched beside a fallen Astartes, shoving the giant warrior bodily toward safety with the aid of gravitic assistance. The next he was near Mortarion, and a spell that had been gathering plague-light in the demon Primarch's fingers guttered into sparks and dead smoke. Then he was near Abaddon, close enough that black wards rippled, thinned, and failed.

Every disappearance forced the champions of Chaos to wonder where he would emerge next, and whether whatever protection they trusted would still exist when he did.

Lion made them pay for every heartbeat their attention strayed.

Abaddon came in low, Drach'nyen sweeping for Guilliman's leg in a cut meant to cripple before the kill. Lion's Shield intercepted with a crack like a thunderhead splitting. Golden force erupted outward and hurled the Warmaster back across the mud, his boots carving trenches through blood-black earth before he rolled aside. Experience alone saved him from the wave of Celestine's fire that followed an instant later, a sheet of white-gold flame that scorched the scarlet ground behind him into glassy black ruin.

Above them, Mortarion lifted one clawed hand and again gathered Warp-light around it, his gaze fixed on Celestine's exposed back.

The spell died unborn.

Koron appeared above him for a single heartbeat, hanging in the air like a mistake in reality. The Warp recoiled from his presence. Mortarion's wings faltered, the foul radiance in his palm unraveled into greasy vapor, and Koron vanished again in a snap of displaced air before the scythe could reach him.

Abaddon regained his footing. Mortarion dropped heavily to the earth beside him, cracked mud shifting beneath his boots. The two exchanged a glance. Somewhere during the exchange, they had been forced nearly forty feet back from the Imperials.

"Enough." Abaddon planted both hands upon Drach'nyen's hilt, the demon blade point-down in the earth. His mouth was drawn into a hard line. "Your formation is vile."

Guilliman arched an eyebrow despite the blood drying on his face. "Coming from the man whose kidnapping attempt ended in a two-on-one arena deathmatch, I take that as a compliment."

Celestine hovered several feet overhead, one wing mantled slightly as she watched them. Her grin flashed bright beneath the grime and blood. "So does this mean we're all going to be staring at each other until we leave?"

Abaddon's eyes flicked toward the wider battle.

Beyond the ruined arena center, the Imperial retreat continued in disciplined layers. Custodes and Ultramarines fell back toward the portal in ordered ranks, gun-servitors and damaged automata left behind to sell each second with fire and metal. The Chaos host still pressed from every side, yet the center had become a knife-thin choke.

Guilliman could almost see the calculations unspooling behind Abaddon's eyes.

Chaos would crush that island of resistance eventually.

It would not do so before most of the Imperials escaped.

The Primarchs would get through. Celestine would get through. If Abaddon tried to force the issue and capture the portal after the Grey Knights were slain or withdrawn, he would be feeding his own army into a bottleneck that would turn from battlefield to butcher's abattoir in moments.

Abaddon drove Drach'nyen deeper into the stone and lifted one hand to his earpiece. The faint click of a vox-channel sounded even through the clamor of war.

"All forces, this is the Warmaster. Cease advance on the arena. Take cover and hold position."

For a moment, Guilliman allowed some of the tension to ease from his shoulders and neck, though the Sword never lowered. Whether the pause had come from pragmatism or disgust, he had no intention of wasting it.

That was likely why he noticed the hairs along the back of his neck rise.

Abaddon's head snapped upward.

Mortarion mirrored the motion a heartbeat later, his bloodshot eyes lifting toward some point beyond mortal sight. Around them, the battlefield seemed to pause. Even the engines sounded more distant for an instant, as though the world itself were drawing breath.

Motion flashed at Guilliman's left.

Celestine's silver eyes had gone wide, their light suddenly fierce. Smoke curled from her fingers as she seized Koron by both biceps. Her expression pinched with pain from the contact, yet she did not hesitate.

"I'm sorry."

Then she hurled him away from their position with every ounce of strength in her body.

Koron flew through the air in a tumbling arc of pale-blue armor and trailing blood.

At that same instant, the sky reopened.

Red stormclouds boiled into existence overhead with impossible speed, gathering from nothing in a matter of heartbeats. They spiraled downward in a vast crimson funnel, another Khorneite vortex twisting its way from the Immaterium into realspace like an old wound ripping itself open anew.

And Guilliman saw.

As he had upon first entering the hellish arena, when reality had flickered and shown him the things behind the arena, the veil thinned once more.

Eight burning points of wrath opened in the dark.

They were impossibly vast, set at distances no sane geometry could hold, yet close enough to make his blood run cold. The black-red-violet murk of the Warp churned around them. Stars bent. Infinity shifted. Something older than empires and fouler than any beast of flesh leaned forward from the depths of unreality and fixed its attention upon one tiny point below.

A weapon emerged, so vast it blotted out the stars.

Guilliman had almost expected absurdity.

A chainaxe the size of a moon. A blade of screaming fire. Some impossible nightmare contrivance born from a god's ego and steeped in all the ornamented madness of the Warp.

What came instead was simple.

An axe of rough obsidian and blood-slick bone, bound in sun-baked leather cords.

Faces writhed within its dark mass, mouths stretched wide in voiceless screams. Blood ran in thick ropes along its warped edge. For all the terror of it, the thing was ugly in the oldest and truest sense. Its proportions were crude. Its edge malformed. The marks of bad strikes still scarred its surface, visible even at that impossible scale.

One of the first shapes ever lifted in anger and brought down to break another living thing.

Understanding struck Guilliman with almost painful clarity.

Ah, he thought. Of course.

The first axe.

It fell.

The Immaterium convulsed beneath its edge.

Guilliman watched the crude axe descend through distances that had no meaning, the black-red vastness of the Warp folding around its path. The eight burning eyes behind it narrowed until there was nothing left save murder.

Then reality lost its grip upon the vision.

The axe vanished.

The sky turned red.

Celestine screamed something Guilliman could not hear.

A bolt of crimson lightning came down, intent and power manifested as best it could.

It did not strike Koron.

It broke.

Six meters above him, the incandescent column crashed against empty air.

The lightning spread outward across the invisible boundary in branching veins of red-white fire, crawling over nothing, circling the mortal at its center. It split and recoiled, struck again, divided, and searched for some imperfection in the sphere through which it might force itself.

There was none. For all the wrath against it, Koron's null field held.

Then the earth beneath him broke instead.

Koron dropped almost a foot as the ground collapsed beneath his boots. His knees buckled. Mud exploded around his greaves as he caught himself, shoulders hunched, arms thrown outward for balance.

Guilliman understood.

The power could not reach Koron.

It could still crush him against the world.

"Koron!"

The crimson pillar thickened. The sound ceased to resemble thunder. It became pressure. A single continuous note rolled through the arena, too deep to hear properly, something Guilliman felt instead through his teeth, through the bones of his skull, through the shattered stone beneath his feet.

The ground around Koron fractured in widening concentric rings.

Mud blasted outward. Chunks of masonry lifted at the edge of the null field, hung impossibly in the air for half a second, then slammed flat again as though struck by an unseen hammer.

Blue-white light flared from Koron's armor as his anti-grav plates ignited and his shields tried to defend him.

For an instant, the little armored figure pushed back.

The earth sank another foot.

Koron dropped with it.

Both hands slammed into the ground. His arms locked beneath him, trembling violently as the invisible weight increased. Servos shrieked from within his armor. Guilliman saw one elbow buckle, correct, and buckle again.

The bolt continued.

One.

Blood-red clouds boiled outward from the point of impact, spreading across the sky in great rolling sheets.

Two.

Crimson lightning branched across the heavens from horizon to horizon, veins of furious light crawling through the storm. Every arc bent inward.

Every one fed the pillar. Every one descended upon a single mortal man.

Three.

Guilliman took a step, only for Celestine to seize his arm.

"No!"

He rounded on her.

"He is being crushed!"

"I know!"

Her silver eyes were wide, their light reflected crimson by the storm above.

"And there is nothing you can do for him!"

Four.

Something cracked.

Guilliman heard it through Koron's open vox.

Koron folded farther beneath the pressure. One arm gave way and his shoulder slammed into the mud. A strangled gasp burst across the channel.

Then came another crack.

Guilliman knew that sound.

He had heard it on a thousand battlefields, beneath artillery barrages and collapsing fortifications, from mortals and Astartes alike.

Bone breaking.

He moved.

Lion's arm barred his path.

"Wait."

"I will not—!"

"You cannot block that."

Guilliman's eyes dropped toward the Shield.

Lion did not follow his gaze. He did not need to. "The Shield can turn aside power that reaches it," Lion said, his voice low beneath the endless thunder. His grip tightened. "That power cannot reach him at all."

Five.

The ground beneath Koron sank in a slow, relentless tide, as though some incomprehensible hand had placed a thumb upon the world and was simply leaning harder.

Koron disappeared lower into the forming crater.

One leg twisted sideways as the stone beneath it fractured. His anti-grav plates screamed in protest, blue-white radiance blazing along his back and thighs.

One burst apart, sending sparks spraying across the mud. Koron's breathing came through the vox in rapid, shallow bursts. He could not scream. There was no room left in his chest to draw the breath.

Six.

Abaddon had backed away.

Guilliman noticed only because even the Warmaster seemed to have forgotten the battle.

Drach'nyen hung lowered at his side.

Mortarion stood equally motionless, wings drawn close behind him.

Neither looked at Koron.

They were staring upward.

At what waited beyond the thinning skin of reality.

Guilliman saw something in Abaddon's face that he had not expected.

Recognition.

And beneath it—

Fear.

The crimson column darkened.

Red became scarlet. Scarlet became something deeper, older, closer to the color of blood before it ever touched air.

The pressure increased.

Koron screamed. It lasted less than a second, the sound ending abruptly as the last of the breath was crushed from his lungs.

Seven.

The earth failed.

Koron vanished into a depression of shattered black stone.

For a heartbeat, Guilliman could see only one armored hand hooked over the edge of the crater, fingers digging furrows through rock as though sheer stubbornness might anchor him to the surface.

Then that hand slipped lower.

The lightning followed.

Still it could not cross those final six meters.

Still the null held.

Still Khorne poured more into the strike.

The sky groaned.

The arena trembled beneath Guilliman's feet.

Far beyond them, already damaged walls folded inward. Masonry spilled from battlements. Tanks rocked on their suspensions as crews fought to keep them upright. Astartes staggered beneath a pressure that was only the faintest echo of what descended upon Koron.

Guilliman stared upward.

And understood.

This was no demon lashing out in fury, or champion borrowing a fragment of patronage.

Something vast beyond comprehension was reaching across the boundary between realms and forcing more and more of itself through a wound reality desperately attempted to close.

Power enough to break armies.

Power enough to turn wars.

Spent here.

On one bleeding mortal buried in the earth.

Because that mortal had reached into a god's grasp—

and stolen something back.

Eight.

Beyond the veil, the first axe completed its swing.

The crimson pillar vanished.

The sudden absence threw Guilliman forward half a step.

Silence struck the battlefield harder than the thunder had.

For several seconds, the red clouds remained overhead, vast and turning, robbed suddenly of purpose. Then they began to unravel. Crimson faded to pink. Pink to gray. The wound in the sky closed. And little by little, ordinary blue returned.

Abaddon's grin returned at the same instant he vanished in a flare of black smoke.

Celestine and Lion followed a heartbeat later, one disappearing in a burst of silver radiance, the other swallowed by rain, shadow, and the scent of wet leaves.

They were both a fraction too late.

Abaddon had moved first. Black smoke erupted across the shattered arena floor six meters from Koron's crater. The Warmaster emerged already advancing, one armored boot coming down hard enough to crack the stone beneath it.

He took a single step, and stopped.

The point of Fealty waited directly in front of his throat.

Lion stood between him and Koron, the blade held perfectly still in one hand, the Shield angled across his body. Rainwater still gleamed for an instant along the green of his armor before the battlefield heat stole it away.

Celestine appeared beside Koron almost simultaneously.

She dropped to one knee in the broken earth and seized him beneath the arms.

Pain flashed immediately across her face. Smoke curled from between her fingers where they touched his battered armor, but she grit her teeth and spread her wings. Silver-white light flooded through every feather, illuminating the crater and throwing Koron's broken silhouette across the blackened stone.

The light intensified-

Nothing happened.

Celestine remained exactly where she was.

Shock crossed her features as her wings slowly lowered. She released Koron and looked toward Abaddon.

The Warmaster's eyes had never left her. Even as Drach'nyen rested against Fealty, the two blades locked within inches of one another, his attention was elsewhere entirely. "...Curious."

His gaze moved from Celestine to Koron. "I am repelled at six meters, yet you two are not."

His eyes lingered on the smoke rising from Celestine's hands.

"You can approach him. You can touch him, though it causes you pain." His smile sharpened. "But you cannot move him through the Warp."

His gaze flicked toward the distant Grey Knight portal.

"Then the portal is useless to him."

A wet cough interrupted him as Koron twitched in the crater.

Another cough followed, harsher than the first, his lungs struggling to remember their purpose after being crushed almost flat. He dragged in a ragged breath, then another, each one accompanied by the faint wheeze of damaged ribs.

Guilliman spared him only a glance.

Alive. For the moment, that would have to be enough.

His attention swept the battlefield.

The withdrawal continued beyond them. Astartes formations were folding inward toward the portal beneath covering fire, gun-servitors firing until barrels glowed orange and ammunition counters reached zero. Smoke crawled low across the churned earth. Broken tanks burned among heaps of shattered masonry, their ammunition occasionally cooking off with dull, distant concussions.

The Thunderhawk lay several dozen meters away, little more than a smoking carcass now. One wing had been torn nearly free, the engines gutted and deliberately destroyed once it became clear the craft would never fly again.

No extraction there.

Guilliman's gaze narrowed.

His eyes snapped skyward. A thought opened the vox-link through his armor. "Honour, Guilliman. Prepare for teleportation recall. Medical teams standing by."

Static whispered for less than a second.

"Yes, lord!" Aurelius answered, the nominal captain of Macragge's Honour. His voice carried the clipped urgency of a bridge already at battle stations. "Awaiting beacon lock."

Six long strides carried Guilliman to the First Company standard-bearer.

"Sirus."

The veteran straightened despite the blood running down one side of his armor where a bolter shell had torn out a chunk of his torso.

Guilliman's hand closed around the shaft of the great banner, and Sirus released it without hesitation.

"Well done this day."

Then Guilliman turned and hurled the standard. It crossed the arena like a spear, Ultramarine blue snapping violently in the hot wind.

Lion never looked away from Abaddon.

Fealty reversed in his grip. The blade flicked upward and caught the banner's shaft with a precise tap.

Its trajectory shifted up, spinning end over end. Lion struck it a second time with the flat of the sword.

Barely more than a touch. The standard rotated once through the air and dropped neatly across Koron's back.

Abaddon watched the entire display.

Then, without comment, he took one quiet step backward.

Guilliman opened the channel. "Beacon is on location. Single target. Evac now."

Blue-white light fell from the heavens. The teleport beam struck with a muted roar, hurling grit and fragments of bone outward from the crater. Loose scraps of grey Warp-flesh vanished within the glare. Guilliman raised one arm against the sudden brilliance.

Then the light disappeared.

His stomach dropped.

The banner was gone.

Koron was not.

He remained in the crater, slowly pushing himself onto his hands and knees, swaying side to side as his body tried to remember how to move.

His faceplate was split across one side. Blood streaked the exposed portions of his face and ran in thin trails down the collar of his armor. Dirt had been packed into every seam. Both forearms were visibly bent where the metal had buckled beneath Khorne's pressure, and small showers of sparks spat intermittently from ruptured joints.

Abaddon smiled again. He took another measured step backward as Mortarion came to stand beside him, Silence resting ready in both hands. "More and more curious." The Warmaster's pale eyes moved over Koron as though examining some newly discovered specimen. "Teleportation uses the Warp as its method of traversal. Yet you cannot even beam him out."

His gaze shifted toward Guilliman. "Your portal cannot carry him. Your teleporters cannot take him, and—"

Lion moved.

One boot slid sideways perhaps an inch, and shadow spilled outward. Rain whispered against broken stone. Dead leaves spiraled briefly through air that had smelled of blood and smoke only moments before, and both Lion and Koron vanished inside the sudden forest-dark.

The effect lasted less than a heartbeat.

Then it collapsed with a sharp pop.

Lion stood exactly where he had been.

Koron remained exactly where he had been.

The Primarch's eyes narrowed. His mouth pulled downward by the smallest degree. He looked across the arena toward Guilliman and gave a single, almost imperceptible shake of his head.

Koron's voice rasped over the vox. "Go."

Guilliman looked toward him.

Koron had managed to push himself upright onto his knees. One hand rested against his thigh for support while the other hung awkwardly at his side. His breathing remained fast and shallow, every inhalation catching somewhere inside his chest.

Guilliman opened the channel. "I am not leaving you in the hands—"

"I can get out... on my own." Koron paused to drag in another breath. "Teleport, remember? Beacon back at base."

A coughing fit seized him before he could continue. He doubled over, one arm clutching instinctively at his ribs.

Beneath the coughing, Guilliman could hear the rapid chirping of warning alarms from inside Koron's armor. Whatever systems remained functional appeared to be unanimously informing him that he was in terrible condition.

Guilliman's jaw tightened. "Then use it. Now."

"Not until your men are through."

Koron planted one foot beneath himself. His leg shook violently as he forced it to accept his weight. "If they change their minds, I'm still useful here."

Guilliman hated the logic because he could find no tactical flaw in it.

Personal flaws, on the other hand?

Manifold.

"Reckless fool."

Even through the ruined vox connection, Guilliman could hear the grin.

"Grumpy old man."

"Hasten, my sons! Portal, double-time!" The order rolled across the shattered arena.

The Astartes redoubled their pace. Lighter-armored formations were nearly through now, squads disappearing one after another into the Grey Knights' whirling portal. Behind them, Terminators, Dreadnoughts, and warriors in Gravis plate maintained the shrinking perimeter, walking backward beneath sheets of incoming fire.

Every step surrendered another few meters of blood-soaked ground. Every step brought another warrior closer to escape.

Mortarion, however, seemed almost indifferent to the withdrawal. His fingers tapped slowly against the haft of Silence, producing a steady metallic rhythm beneath the distant thunder of artillery. His ragged wings stirred the rank air behind him, pushing aside coils of plague mist as he looked once more toward the sky.

Toward where Khorne's storm had been.

Then his gaze lowered, first to Celestine, then to Koron.

"He could have supplied entire armies with the force he exerted there."

Celestine's lips remained pressed into a hard, thin line. Her silver hair shifted around her shoulders in the heated wind. "And more."

"For the record," Koron gasped, his shattered faceplate retracting with a protesting whine, "I feel like I just got the shit kicked out of me by several armies."

He turned his head and spat a mouthful of blood into the dirt.

Abaddon began to move.

Not toward Koron. Around him.

The Warmaster paced slowly along the edge of the null field, boots grinding fragments of stone beneath them. He extended Drach'nyen ahead of himself until the blade crossed that invisible boundary.

The effect was immediate, the faces writhing within the demon sword fading. Screaming mouths became dull shapes beneath dead metal. The oily darkness clinging to the blade thinned and disappeared. For several seconds, Abaddon simply watched.

Then he drew the sword back.

The faces returned, and the blade breathed again.

Something approaching fascination entered his expression.

Mortarion began circling from the opposite direction. His gauntleted fingers extended toward the boundary, caressing it as he continued around. The moment his armor brushed it, green corruption crawling over the plate recoiled. Sparks hissed across the metal where plague-born energies met the dead zone.

Celestine shifted closer to Koron, her Argent Blade raised, white-gold flames burning on its length.

Lion moved with her, keeping himself squarely between Koron and Abaddon, Fealty held ready while the Shield remained angled toward Mortarion.

Guilliman disliked the change in his enemies more than he had disliked their attacks.

They were no longer trying to kill Koron.

They were studying him.

Abaddon spoke across the six meters separating him from the wounded mortal. "What do you think, Mortarion? The field appears selective. Have you seen anything like this before?"

"No." Mortarion's respirator released another wet hiss. "There are psykers and blanks with unusual properties against the Neverborn, but this is different." His bloodshot eyes flicked toward Celestine. "She should be in pain simply for remaining within his field."

Abaddon tilted his head. "Perhaps something to do with him being from before the Fall?"

Mortarion's head snapped toward him.

Lion's did the same.

Celestine's silver eyes flickered towards Koron, then back to Abaddon.

Guilliman merely closed his eyes as a curse slipped quietly between his lips.

Mortarion's voice lowered. "A pre-Fall survivor? How did you come to that conclusion?"

Abaddon gestured toward Koron.

Koron's face had gone very carefully blank.

"He stated that he was older than Slaanesh."

Koron slowly raised one finger. "I did say that my diction was under considerable distress due to you attempting to cut me in half."

Mortarion lowered Silence. The point of the scythe touched the earth just outside Koron's field. Fungi bulged upward from cracks in the stone, pale caps swelling and splitting within seconds. Black insects boiled from soil that had not existed moments before. Maggots writhed through suddenly rotten mud while swollen spores burst open and released greasy clouds into the air.

The corruption spread rapidly.

Then it reached six meters from Koron, and stopped. Maggots twisted away. Fungal growth curled back upon itself. Spores drifting toward the boundary simply fell from the air.

Mortarion watched for several seconds. Then he pulled Silence free and began spinning the scythe through long, slow circles at his side. "A lapse in diction," he said, "is often more truthful than words spoken in safety."

"My lord!" Gabriel's shout cut across the arena.

The last of his sons remained on the field, Gabriel standing at their forefront. Behind him waited a dozen Custodes, six to either side, guardian spears leveled toward the champions of Chaos. Their auramite was battered and blackened, scarlet cloth torn by battle, but not one had lowered his weapon.

"We are clear!" Gabriel called. "Exfil, now!"

Guilliman nodded and gestured sharply toward the portal.

"Go."

Gabriel hesitated only long enough to acknowledge the command before retreating.

Guilliman opened the vox. "Make your way to the portal. We are leaving."

Lion nodded. Then, without looking away from Abaddon, he said, "Lady Celestine, put the boy on my shoulders. The right one, please. The whisper-man is already on my left."

Celestine stared at him.

Lion offered no explanation.

After a moment, she apparently decided she did not have the time for whatever nonsense Lion had brought with him. She bent, seized Koron beneath the arms, and immediately hissed as smoke curled from her fingers. One powerful beat of her wings lifted her from the ground long enough to settle the battered mortal against Lion's right pauldron.

Koron slumped there, one arm hooked around the edge of the Primarch's armor for balance.

Abaddon continued watching. "I remain curious."

Celestine's blade ignited brighter in her hand. "About what?"

Abaddon's eyes shifted toward her. "Not you, witch. The boy." His gaze returned to Koron.

"How did you undo Angron?"

Koron looked down at him. Sunlight caught the blood smeared across his face. "Short answer?" He swallowed. "The Nails."

Mortarion reacted instantly. His free hand stabbed toward Koron while green-yellow gas erupted from his respirator.

"Liar."

His fingers tightened around Silence. "Those Nails were not even real. Sanguinius tore them out on Terra ten thousand years ago." His other hand cut sharply through the air. "Do not try to deceive me on matters of the Warp, boy."

Koron's grin returned.

It was crooked. Exhausted. Bloodstained.

And somehow still bright.

"Maybe." He pointed directly at Mortarion. "But Angron thought they were real. His sons thought they were real. Every man, woman, and child who ever heard the stories, witnessed his rampages, or survived one thought they were real."

His finger rose.

Toward the clear blue sky where Khorne's storm had been.

"His story says they were real."

Mortarion lowered Silence until its blade bit into the dirt. Whatever expression crossed his face remained hidden behind the machinery enclosing it. "You are not telling the whole truth."

"Of course not." Koron's head dipped as something shifted unpleasantly beneath his ribs. His breath caught. "Of course there's more to it. But I'm sure as hell not telling you guys how I did it."

Lion, Celestine, and Koron drew alongside Guilliman.

The Custodes flowed around them at once, forming a golden wall between the Primarchs and the two champions of Chaos.

Guilliman's voice cracked across the line. "Halt."

The Custodes stopped.

"Enough have died this day. Fall back. We will join you shortly."

One of them, a warrior Guilliman did not recognize, began to turn.

"My lord—"

Lion cut him off.

"None of you will do more than slow either of them down." His gaze never left Abaddon. "Get through the portal."

For perhaps half a heartbeat, the Custodes remained perfectly still.

Then, with the stoic resignation of professional soldiers obeying an order they thoroughly disliked, they began backstepping toward the portal.

One by one, golden figures disappeared into the swirling light.

Guilliman lowered his voice and opened a private vox-channel. "On my command, make for the portal."

His eyes remained fixed upon Abaddon and Mortarion. "Koron. How long will you need to teleport?"

"I can do it before any of you reach the portal."

"Good. On my mark."

"Wait. One last thing."

"Koron."

"It's important, I promise."

Guilliman closed his eyes for the briefest instant. "Make it quick."

Koron watched the last Custodian disappear. Then he shifted painfully atop Lion's pauldron and fixed Mortarion with a stare.

"Mortarion."

The Plague Primarch looked down at the mortal.

"What?"

Koron thrust a finger toward him.

"Angron was the first."

His voice lost every trace of humor.

"You're next."

Guilliman saw the words land.

Saw the fractional widening of Mortarion's bloodshot eyes. Saw something buried behind that mask of metal and rot move before his brother could smother it. And Guilliman felt an answering surge rise unexpectedly within his own chest.

He crushed it down.

There would be time for that later.

"Now!"

Koron vanished from Lion's shoulder.

Guilliman threw himself into the portal, with Celestine close behind. Lion came last, walking backward through the vortex with the Shield still raised between his brothers and the enemy.

Reality turned inside out. Guilliman's stomach lurched as the world became blue-black light and impossible distance.

Then solid ground struck beneath his boots. Hands seized his armor. His sons dragged him aside as the portal collapsed behind him with a crack of displaced air.

Then—

quiet.

Not true silence.

The faint hum of Astartes power packs filled the air. Artillery still cracked somewhere beyond the defensive lines. Officers shouted orders. Servitors moved between shattered vehicles. Engines rumbled in the distance.

But compared to the arena, it felt like silence.

For several long seconds, nobody seemed willing to believe they were actually out.

Then the cheering began.

One voice.

Then ten.

Then hundreds.

Astartes joined it. Adeptus Mechanicus adepts raised mechanical limbs into the air. Guardsmen shouted themselves hoarse. Medicae personnel stopped in the middle of their work long enough to stare toward the returning Primarchs and laugh.

The sound rolled outward across the encampment.

For once, everyone allowed themselves to understand what had happened.

Guilliman, saved.

Lion, returned.

Angron, restored.

A Living Saint, victorious.

The Custodes, naturally, said nothing. They had a reputation to protect, after all.

Guilliman looked across the encampment.

Medicae teams moved among rows of wounded. Apothecaries knelt beside torn ceramite and blood-soaked stretchers. Officers shouted fresh assignments while battered companies slowly re-formed around surviving standards. Behind them, the last traces of the Grey Knights' portal dissolved into the warm air.

Blue sky stretched overhead, sunlight softly falling.

Guilliman nodded once to himself. Then he straightened, squared his shoulders, and walked toward what remained of a Chimera.

The transport had lost half its hull and most of one track. Its turret was simply gone. Scorch marks had turned its once-painted armor almost entirely black, and something had punched a hole through the passenger compartment large enough that Guilliman could see daylight through the other side.

It was, Guilliman decided, adequate.

With all the dignity he could muster, the Lord Commander of the Imperium sat down upon the wreck.

Ruined metal groaned beneath his weight.

He leaned back against the scorched plating.

Closed his eyes.

Exhaled.

And let the sunlight warm his face.

Something landed softly in the dirt beside him.

Guilliman opened one eye.

Koron had apparently decided that sitting was too ambitious.

The mortal lay flat on his back in the narrow band of shadow cast by the ruined Chimera, one of his wolf-drones curled beside him. The machine's battered head rested near Koron's shoulder, its optics tracking every passing figure while its master stared upward at the underside of a destroyed armored vehicle.

Guilliman considered asking whether he required medical assistance.

Then remembered precisely who he would be asking.

He closed his eyes again.

"...Today sucked."

A grin tugged at Guilliman's lips. "Not entirely." He shifted slightly against the warm metal.

"I got two brothers back."

Settling back onto the hull, he took a deep breath, and sleep took him.

For what seemed like only one moment, there was quiet.

The next, metal hands were striking urgently against his warplate.

"Guilliman."

His eyes opened.

Koron was at his side, and every trace of exhaustion disappeared from Guilliman's mind.

His battered faceplate had retracted completely. Blood still stained his chin and dried in dark streaks in his hair, but Guilliman barely noticed any of it.

The fear written across Koron's face overwhelmed everything else.

"I cannot get in contact with the Brandts."

His breathing quickened.

"I can't reach anyone."

Guilliman's grogginess vanished instantly.

"Koron—"

Before he could say more—

before he could explain what had happened aboard the Indomitable—

before he could tell him what had happened to Dusthaven's people—

The Custodes moved.

Golden armor closed around the ruined Chimera.

Scarlet cloth stirred between gleaming plates. Guardian spears lowered. Sentinel blades cleared their sheaths. Misericordias rested at armored hips while broad praesidium shields locked together until Guilliman and Koron stood inside a ring of auramite.

One Custodian stepped forward.

His voice was flat. Emotionless.

Merciless.

"Under the authority of the Golden Throne, by Writ of Terra and in the name of the Emperor, you, Koron, are hereby under arrest."

 

[Talon88.1]

So! As promised, AMA is open, feel free to ask whatever you like!

If you want the answers to be from the characters, or from me as the author, just specify that

That said, obviously spoilers shall be maintained

 

[BuilderOne]

"Under the authority of the Golden Throne, by Writ of Terra and in the name of the Emperor, you, Koron, are hereby under arrest."

Click to shrink...

Darn, I was not expecting this. Wonder if BiG E was actually lucid enough to issue this order?

 

[Talon88.1]

Darn, I was not expecting this. Wonder if BiG E was actually lucid enough to issue this order?

Click to shrink...

I can safely say no, Big E did not issue the order

 

[Gaffhook]

I can safely say no, Big E did not issue the order

Click to shrink...

So, sounds like either lords of Terra doing normql shitty things, machanicus doing toaster things, or a fraction of Big E deciding to act on its own.

 

[Talon88.1]

So, sounds like either lords of Terra doing normql shitty things, machanicus doing toaster things, or a fraction of Big E deciding to act on its own.

Click to shrink...

Well, the High Lords DID have a scene several chapters ago where they were discussing the situation, and the Assassinorium leader mentioned to Valdor 'He might be able to restore the Throne.'

 

[Talon88.1]

Chapter Seventy-Seven

---

Reminder dear listeners, the Voxbox remains open at all times!

---

The plaza of the Imperial headquarters had gone silent.

A ring of golden warriors stood around Roboute Guilliman and Koron.

Astartes and mortal soldiers alike watched from beyond the cordon, their expressions ranging from disbelief to barely restrained anger. More than one hand rested upon the hilt of a weapon. Bolters remained lowered, but Guilliman could see the tension in the fingers wrapped around their grips, the minute shifts of armored shoulders as warriors calculated distances and firing angles.

His sons. His nephews. Men who had followed him through fire and blood, who had stood beside him against horrors that should never have existed.

All looked to their Primarchs for guidance.

And for the moment, Guilliman had no answers.

Or rather, no easy ones.

The Custodes had formed their cordon with characteristic precision. A wall of auramite, shields, and guardian spears surrounded the two of them, every warrior occupying precisely enough space to support his brothers without compromising his own reach. Their golden armor caught the harsh white light of the headquarters' floodlamps, its polished surfaces dulled here and there by the ash still drifting through the plaza.

Beyond them stood the remnants of an army that had only just survived the arena.

Koron stood with his back to the ruined Chimera, his brow furrowed beneath a tangle of sweat-darkened hair. His remaining strength seemed devoted entirely to keeping himself upright. He looked from one golden warrior to another, plainly bewildered, his expression carrying the weary disbelief of a man who had already endured far too much for one day.

The spears remained pointed toward him.

Guilliman slowly pushed himself upright. The battered Chimera shifted beneath his weight as he settled on its ruined hull, both feet planted firmly on the broken paving stones. Every movement pulled at injuries that had barely begun to heal. He kept his hands in plain sight, resting them deliberately upon his thighs.

There were far too many weapons present for an ill-considered gesture.

"Who," he began, forcing what remained of his command into a throat scraped raw by smoke, blood, poison and exhaustion, "is in command?"

"I am, my lord."

Guilliman closed his eyes.

For one brief, miserable moment, he wished the voice had belonged to anyone else.

Of course.

Of course it was him.

"Colquan."

He turned his head toward the speaker.

Tribune Maldovar Colquan stepped forward from the ranks of Custodes beyond the inner cordon. His armor bore the marks of recent battle, though the Tribune himself moved with the same controlled assurance Guilliman remembered from Terra.

"Why are you arresting him?"

Colquan removed his helm.

The face beneath was painfully familiar. A smooth, shaven scalp, a neatly trimmed grey beard, and the stern, unyielding features of a warrior Guilliman remembered all too well from the chambers of the Golden Palace, when the burden of the Imperial Regency had first been laid upon his shoulders.

The Tribune tucked his helm into the crook of his arm. His expression did not soften.

"My lord," he said, his voice carrying clearly through the silent plaza. "For the murder of nine of my brothers, and the death of Ancient Tormas."

For a moment, even the distant sounds of the headquarters seemed to fade.

"Guilliman?" Koron's voice cut through the silence. The mortal stared at him, eyes wide, confusion giving way to something considerably more alarmed.

"What the hell is he talking about? I haven't killed any of these guys."

Guilliman held up a hand toward Colquan, forestalling whatever answer the Tribune might have offered.

Then he turned fully toward Koron, drawing a slow breath, the movement sending a dull ache through his battered chest.

"Thirty-seven hours ago, the Custodes arrived in system. Thirty-six hours ago, a squad of fifteen Custodes and a Custodial Dreadnought boarded the Indomitable."

He paused.

The words were simple enough. He had read casualty reports spanning ten thousand years, names and numbers threatening to become abstractions.

These numbers were considerably smaller.

Somehow, that made them no easier to speak.

"Forty-two minutes later, only six Custodes returned."

---

Thirty-six hours ago.

The brilliant golden light of the teleportation beam vanished from Shield-Captain Cassian Corvane's vision.

His praesidium shield was already raised.

Beside him, guardian spears leveled in perfect synchronization as his brothers established a defensive circle, their armored boots ringing against the metal deck. There were no shouted commands, no hurried adjustments. Each Custodian moved into position with the practiced assurance of warriors who had spent centuries learning to fight beside one another.

At the center of their formation stood Ancient Tormas.

The Contemptor-Galatus Dreadnought towered above them, an immense figure of auramite and adamantium whose armored bulk seemed almost too large for the bridge. His great sword hummed with restrained power, the broad face of his praesidium shield catching the last fading sparks of the teleportation beam. On his blade, the ignition lights of his twin flamers glowed faintly, nearly lost beneath the cold illumination of the overhead lumens.

His first step struck the deck like a hammer.

Cassian's visor filled with targeting information as his armor assessed the chamber.

The bridge matched the configuration supplied by the Adeptus Mechanicus: a broad command chamber arranged around a central pillar, with secondary stations radiating outward toward the walls. Rows of consoles stood in orderly ranks, their display surfaces alive with streams of figures and shifting diagrams. Narrow strips of light traced the edges of the deck plating, while overhead conduits disappeared into armored housings above.

Everything appeared functional.

Yet something was distinctly wrong.

Cassian had boarded enough Mechanicus vessels to know what their command decks ordinarily looked like.

There should have been candles, or at least the blackened remains of countless votive offerings. Brass devotional plates, purity seals, hanging banners, sacred cogwork displayed as much for reverence as function. Somewhere, a priest should have been muttering binharic prayers over a machine that had performed the same task without interruption for centuries.

There was none of it.

Even the central command pillar stood vacant. Cassian recognized the apparatus from the intelligence reports: the station where the ship's master, or a suitably augmented priest, would ordinarily connect with the vessel's systems.

The cradle was empty. Its interface ports were dark, its restraint mechanisms folded neatly away.

Only the quiet activity of a ship that was very much awake.

Several seconds passed.

"Sweep and secure the room," Cassian ordered. "I will attempt to establish communication."

Four Custodes detached themselves from the formation, one moving toward each of the smaller side entrances while another pair approached the massive double doors at the far end of the chamber.

The remaining warriors adjusted immediately to cover the gaps. Shields angled outward, spears tracking the entrances and the recesses between consoles. They spread sufficiently that a single explosive charge could not engulf the entire formation, while keeping every brother within supporting distance.

Tormas moved toward the central pillar.

His armored footsteps sent dull vibrations through the deck as he positioned himself beside the vacant command station, crimson optics sweeping slowly across the surrounding machinery.

Cassian turned his attention upward.

A Mechanicus bridge of this size should have been crowded with observation systems. Servo-skulls drifting through the air, wall-mounted pict-captures, clusters of mechanical optics recording every movement made by the crew.

He could see the cameras. Small, dark lenses recessed into housings along the ceiling and walls. Every one of them was inactive.

He studied the nearest unit for several seconds, watching for the faintest adjustment of its iris.

Nothing.

The lighting was steady. The displays responded to changing information. The deck was clean, free of the dust that would have accumulated in a chamber left unattended.

The ship was operating normally, yet every observation system on its bridge had been deliberately silenced.

Cassian tightened his fingers around the haft of his guardian spear. He had encountered abandoned vessels before. Derelicts whose crews had fled or died, leaving their ships to drift through the void.

This bridge had none of the stillness of a derelict.

It felt prepared.

He allowed himself another moment to study the empty command station, then raised his voice. "To the occupants of this vessel, I am Shield-Captain Cassian Corvane, of the Emperor's Ten Thousand."

His amplified words rolled across the bridge, reflecting faintly from the metal walls.

"Reveal yourselves, for the Throne has called, and you shall answer."

Silence.

A ventilation fan clicked somewhere overhead.

Cassian waited, counting silently to thirty.

No figure emerged from behind the consoles. No voice answered from the ship's communication systems. Not even an automated acknowledgment appeared upon the displays.

His expression hardened beneath his helm. At last, he raised his spear toward the far doors. "No reply. Hexal and Galius, secure the bridge and prepare to establish a noospheric link."

He surveyed the remaining Custodes, meeting their visors one by one.

"Everyone else, split and sweep the ship."

---

Lucia watched the golden-armored warriors begin to move down the corridor.

Her avatar stood in the heart of her awareness, a pale bloom of petals and curling vine-work suspended within the ship's internal network. At her thought, one vine split into a thousand hair-thin tendrils, each one carrying commands into a different layer of the Indomitable. Doors cycled. Routes recalculated. Defensive priorities rewrote themselves in blinking strings of code and light.

She had studied everything she could find on the Custodes.

Fragments from archived records. Tactical annotations buried in Guilliman's files. Captain Orvek and Ira's guarded conversations. Elly's blunt assessments. Sasha and Koron's more colorful ones. Long hours spent listening to the odd, patched-together family she had found herself part of as they pieced together what sort of beings the Emperor's personal guard truly were.

All of it had led to the same conclusion.

The Custodes were dangerous.

Not simply powerful, though they were that in abundance. Not merely skilled, or disciplined, or fanatically loyal.

Dangerous in the way of weapons that had never once needed to doubt their own purpose.

They were not a force any of them had ever wanted to contend with.

Now, however, they were in her home.

Above, deep in the hidden shipyard wrapped inside the gutted shell of the false frigate, a stellar-core reactor began to wake. Systems that had slumbered in cautious secrecy for months stirred into life. Deep metal structures thrummed as containment fields rose and locked into place. Blue-white energy bloomed through conduits and half-finished housings, the awakening heart of the hidden cruiser climbing, moment by measured moment, toward viability.

Below, quiet alerts began to sound throughout Dusthaven's refuge decks.

They were not klaxons. Lucia would not frighten the children unless she had no other choice.

Soft chimes and amber lights pulsed through the corridors instead, gentle but insistent. The people of Dusthaven—almost all women and children now, with the men still sealed inside the medical pods—began to gather what little they could. Bags were shouldered. Blankets were rolled. Children were lifted into waiting arms. Fear moved through them in currents Lucia could feel through the cameras and mics and biosigns she monitored, but so too did trust.

Sentinels formed up among them at once, metal wolves pacing to heel beside their assigned groups. Their optics glowed softly in the half-light, claws clicking against the deck as they shepherded civilians toward the evacuation paths.

And between the people under her care and the invading enemy, six thousand drones came awake.

Simulation training collapsed into combat readiness in an instant. Dormant weapon locks disengaged. Networked sensors spooled up and flooded Lucia's awareness with tactical feeds, targeting resolutions, route overlays, and firing solutions.

Squads of Sentinels broke into coordinated packs. Hovering Aegis rings rose from their cradles with a low electrical hum, shield emitters beginning to cycle. Vipers spilled from wall recesses and maintenance ducts in skittering swarms, grapples and cutters folded tight beneath their bodies.

Flights of teardrop-shaped Promethuses detached from charging racks and lifted smoothly into the air. Bastions lumbered into motion, their heavy frames shaking dust from the deck as triple-beam plasma lances rotated toward readiness.

And behind that growing mechanical host, thirty cyclopean crimson eyes brightened one by one.

Lucia let herself linger on the tactical display of the boarding party for a fraction longer.

A handful of intruders only.

A mere sliver of the Ten Thousand.

And still she could feel the weight of what they represented.

She did not know how well she could hold them.

She did not know how long.

But this was her home.

These were her people.

The corridors they marched through had sheltered frightened children. The decks beneath their feet had become workshop, refuge, and nursery alike. The strange little community Koron had gathered around himself had built this place from scavenged metal, stolen time, and stubborn love. It was unfinished, improvised, and fragile.

It was hers.

And if the Emperor's chosen had come here in strength, then strength was what they would be met with.

Lucia's petals curled inward. Her expression, for all that it was only an avatar's face, hardened.

She would make even the Emperor's Chosen bleed for every step they took.

---

The first attack came from the shadows.

A razor-thin beam of blue light lanced out from the darkness ahead, striking the center of Cassian's helm.

His refractor field erupted in a brilliant flash, scattering the energy across its protective envelope before the beam dissipated. His shield snapped upward a fraction of a second too late, the impact already spent by the time its gilded face covered his head.

The faintest flicker of irritation stirred in his chest.

His armor had scarcely finished recording the impact before his HUD traced the shot back to its origin. Cassian's guardian spear rose in the same motion, a bolter shell lashing into the shadowed recess from which the attack had come.

The discharge illuminated a narrow maintenance alcove, revealing bundled conduits, heavy pipework, and a scattering of sparks where the round struck metal.

Nothing moved.

"Contact," he reported, advancing with his shield raised. "Initial enemy energy weapons ineffective. Shooter unseen. Switching on additional sensor modes."

His visor responded immediately.

Thermal imagery washed across his vision, transforming the corridor into a landscape of burning reds and brilliant whites. Heat radiated from conduits running beneath the deck, from the walls behind which immense machinery labored, from ventilation grilles breathing increasingly warm air into the passageway.

Cassian dismissed the overlay. Too much machinery. Too much heat. Even the ambient temperature was rising, a slow but measurable increase that his armor had already begun compensating for.

He switched to active sonar.

The resulting return was a confused storm of vibrations. Pumps, turbines, pressure regulators, and the distant thunder of heavy industrial equipment flooded his sensors with overlapping signals. Millimeter-wave scans fared little better, reflecting from metal surfaces, armored bulkheads, and the dense forest of machinery concealed behind them.

Each system supplied information. Very little of it was useful.

Cassian slowed his advance, studying the corridor ahead through simple human eyes. Cold white lumens illuminated broad stretches of deck plating, while the spaces between the overhead fixtures remained pooled in shadow. The passage was wide enough to accommodate heavy cargo servitors, with recessed maintenance doors and thick support ribs breaking the walls at regular intervals.

An excellent place to conceal an attacker, and an equally excellent place to vanish after firing.

His vox crackled. "Contact, hall four. Hypersonic spike. Ineffective, no shooter. Sensors are being clouded."

Another brother spoke a moment later. "Contact, junction of port access. Some manner of foam landmine. Strong, but nothing I could not break free of."

Cassian listened without interrupting, assembling the reports into a developing picture.

Different weapons. Different locations. Single attacks, followed by withdrawal.

Then Ancient Tormas joined the channel, his deep metallic voice carrying the faint distortion of his Dreadnought's vox-caster. "Central corridor contact. Plasma lance. Mild damage to shield. Enemy withdrew after a single blast."

A brief silence followed.

Then another Custodian spoke. "They are testing us."

Cassian's eyes narrowed. "Indeed."

He glanced toward a ventilation grille overhead. Warm air stirred the dust collected along its edges, the flow strong enough to be felt even through the subtle environmental feedback of his armor.

Something about the corridor had changed since the first shot.

"Has anyone else noticed the environmentals?"

"Yes, Captain." Hexal's response came from the bridge, his voice steady beneath the faint background chatter of the noospheric equipment. "Environmental controls are showing conflicting readings. Decompression in some sectors, while atmospheric pressure is rising rapidly in others. Gravity fluctuations in non-vital sections of the ship. Doors opening and closing rapidly, then slowly."

Cassian stopped beside a reinforced bulkhead, taking a moment to examine the nearest access hatch.

It remained firmly shut.

"I have yet to determine whether these are malfunctions or deliberate alterations," Hexal continued, "though I heavily lean toward deliberate."

Cassian considered that.

Pressure. Gravity. Doors. Temperature.

Any one of them could be an ordinary malfunction aboard a vessel of this size. Even several occurring together would not have been unheard of, particularly aboard a Forge-Tender whose machinery had been extensively modified.

But the timing troubled him.

Machines did not generally begin behaving erratically the moment hostile forces boarded their vessel without some underlying cause.

"Are these events occurring around our brothers?"

"No, sir. They seem to be limited to a small section far to the aft of the ship. However, the systems were not engaged in these activities prior to our arrival. The timestamps and event logs make that clear."

"And you are sure the logs are correct?"

"No, sir." There was no embarrassment in the reply. Hexal stated the limitation as simply as he might report an enemy's range. "Currently, I am unable to do more than open minor files. That in and of itself is... strange."

Cassian resumed walking, the soft vibration of the deck continued beneath his boots. Somewhere beyond the bulkhead, an enormous mechanism engaged with a low, resonant thrum, followed by the distant hiss of pressure being released.

"AdMech security, or something else?"

"Something else. Mechanicus security protocols have never resisted our intrusion methods for this long."

Cassian's next step faltered, almost imperceptibly.

The Custodes had access to resources and methods of technological intrusion that most Imperial commanders could scarcely imagine. Their operations were supported by knowledge and equipment carefully preserved from the most secretive arsenals of Terra.

Even the defenses of a major Forge World were not expected to resist them indefinitely.

"...Even with your aid?"

"Even with it, Captain." Hexal paused.

Cassian knew his brother well enough to recognize the significance of that hesitation.

"I increasingly suspect we are dealing with something beyond Mechanicus technology."

For several heartbeats, Cassian said nothing.

His gaze traveled along the corridor once more, taking in the clean bulkheads, the orderly infrastructure, the absence of devotional ornamentation.

"Understood," he said at last. "Ensure nothing follows our intrusion back to its source."

"The datacage remains isolated, Captain. I am monitoring the transmission channels."

"Good. Inform me if anything changes. Out."

Cassian closed the private channel and returned his attention to the squad vox. He had begun forming his next orders when the connection erupted into noise.

Weapons fire. A sharp metallic impact. The distorted shriek of something tearing through armor plate.

His HUD immediately elevated a friendly-status indicator.

Mikhale.

The Custodian's vital signs climbed sharply from their accustomed baseline. A single heartbeat out of rhythm, followed by a rapid surge of adrenaline as combat stimulants and his own superhuman physiology responded to sudden danger.

Cassian felt his grip tighten around his spear.

Then Mikhale's voice cut through the noise.

"Multiple contacts, engaging."

---

Mikhale's guardian spear snapped out.

The blunt haft struck the first of the wolven drones square across the skull, crushing metal inward with a sharp crack and sending fragments of spinning saw-teeth skittering across the deck. He stepped past the collapsing machine in the same motion, spearhead already arcing on.

Its power-field sheared through a second drone from shoulder to hip, splitting armor, wire, and internal mechanisms in a shower of sparks. Before the halves had even struck the floor, Mikhale spun, the spear's built-in adrathic emitter lashing out in a flash of emerald light. A third machine, caught mid-leap behind him, had its chestplate simply cease to exist.

The corridor around him was narrow enough to magnify every impact. Metal rang underfoot. Sparks spat against the walls. Warning runes flashed across his visor as movement flooded in from every direction.

His foot hooked beneath the ruined chassis of the first drone and kicked it up and sideways, hurling it into the next rank of the pack. The follow-through of his spear smashed across the faces of two more rushing machines, folding one in half and ripping a shower of cables from the other as though he were threshing grain rather than fighting.

But the front line had not met him head on.

They had gone low.

Four of the half-lupine machines vaulted and skittered beneath the arc of his strike, claws scraping against the deck before locking onto him. Two slammed into his greaves, magnetized hindpaws biting into the metal plating and anchoring themselves to the floor to hinder his movement.

The other two landed high, clinging to his shoulders, their claws raking furiously at his helm and gorget. Bursts of gold rippled across his refractor field each time they struck, the barrier flaring and hissing under the impacts.

Mikhale's right hand released the spear without hesitation.

His gauntlet closed around the drone clinging to his left shoulder, fingers crushing through its frame until metal screamed beneath his grip. With a grunt, he tore it free and swung it downward like a mace.

It smashed into the pair affixed to his legs, scattering all three across the deck in a clatter of ruined limbs and shattered plating.

The fourth machine remained.

Its claws scraped at the seam of his gorget, probing for the narrow vulnerabilities where armor met armor, trying to force its way through shield and seal alike. Mikhale ignored it. Instead, he drove his spear forward into the next oncoming attacker, impaling it clean through the chest at the exact moment he hurled his full body sideways.

He hit the wall like a battering ram.

Auramite and transhuman muscle drove his shoulder — and the drone clamped there — half a foot into the bulkhead. Metal shrieked. The wall buckled. The machine's chest collapsed into a flattened ruin between Custodian and ship.

For an instant, the drone went limp.

Then the world lurched.

A high, piercing shriek knifed into Mikhale's ears, so sharp and sudden that the corridor seemed to tilt. His balance faltered. Vision swam. For the briefest of moments it felt as if his own inner ear had betrayed him, his immense sense of equilibrium stripped away by a sound too high and vicious for unaugmented flesh to endure.

Then his helm's autosystems reacted, the audio receptors slammed shut.

Silence crashed down.

A blink. A breath. The flare of caged lightning from the wolves' energy projectors splashing against his shields. The hot stink of scorched air. The scrape of metal claws across the deck.

And Mikhale was back in the fight.

---

Lucia watched the telemetry flood in.

Within the quiet garden of her avatar, streams of information unfurled around her like ribbons, countless fragments of recorded combat data resolving into increasingly detailed models.

Custodian armor articulation. Maximum joint rotation. Reaction times measured in fractions of milliseconds. The speed with which the warrior recovered when a drone latched onto his guardian spear, and the tremendous force exerted when he tore another free of his shoulder.

Spatial awareness. Weapon reach. Target prioritization.

Acoustic responses, autonomic reactions, the precise interval between the sonic attack disrupting his equilibrium and his helmet compensating for it.

Her petals shifted as another set of calculations completed.

Every strike had taught her something. Every failed attack had revealed another defensive capability, another limitation to account for. Even the destruction of her drones provided valuable information, their final moments preserved in a thousand overlapping sensor feeds.

In thirty seconds, a single Custodian had destroyed sixty-two drones.

An astonishing display of violence.

And Lucia had recorded every moment of it.

She studied the reconstructed engagement for another fraction of a second, watching the golden warrior move through the simulated bodies of his attackers. His armor's protective fields were formidable, his reflexes extraordinary, and his physical strength exceeded several of her preliminary estimates.

Her next experiment would require considerably more force.

With a quiet shift of one flowering vine, Lucia issued a new instruction.

Nearby the battle, heavy armor plates opened. Four armored legs settled onto the deck, and three articulated plasma lances rose from their resting positions, their emitter tips beginning to glow.

Lucia quietly pushed a Rook forward.

---

The plasma beam struck without warning.

Mikhale's refractor field erupted in a brilliant flare of golden light, the protective barrier collapsing beneath the concentrated discharge. Heat washed across his left side, warning runes flashing crimson across his visor as he threw himself into a roll.

A wolven drone lunged through the space he had occupied a heartbeat earlier.

His left hand snapped out, the back of his gauntlet catching the machine across its skull. Metal crumpled beneath the blow, the drone's head bursting apart as its ruined chassis tumbled across the deck.

Mikhale came up on one knee, guardian spear already sweeping toward the next attacker.

Two seconds.

That was all the respite he had before another of the mechanical wolves closed the distance.

His armor registered the damage in precise, dispassionate figures. The refractor field was struggling to recover, and his left pauldron glowed cherry-red, heat bleeding through the auramite and into the layers beneath. A faint haze rose from the scorched metal, the air around his shoulder shimmering.

At the far end of the corridor stood the source.

A hulking, four-legged machine occupied much of the passage, its heavy chassis supported by thick, articulated limbs. Armored plates overlapped across its angular body, while three segmented arms rose from its back and flanks, each terminating in a smooth metallic sphere.

The foremost sphere still glowed with the fading brilliance of its discharge.

The other two were turning toward him.

Mikhale measured the distance, the width of the corridor, and the increasingly calculated movement of the smaller drones swarming between them.

The machine had chosen its position well.

Its bulk occupied the passage, while the smaller constructs continued pressing him from every direction. If he committed to a charge, they would have ample opportunity to interfere. If he remained where he stood, the heavy weapon would have another clear shot.

His spear became a blur of crackling energy, its blade punching through armored chests, withdrawing, and striking again before the collapsing machines could reach the deck. Seven thrusts in scarcely a handful of seconds, each delivered with the economical precision of a warrior who had spent centuries perfecting the art of killing.

For a moment, the tide of metal recoiled.

Mikhale took a single step backward, planting his foot and settling his weight as he watched the spheres at the far end of the corridor begin to brighten.

His vox clicked open.

"New contact. Heavy unit, quadrupedal configuration. Three plasma weapons of unknown design."

Another wolf lunged. His spear caught it beneath the jaw and hurled it backward into its fellows.

"Single impact overwhelmed refractor field and damaged warplate."

He shifted his damaged shoulder away from the distant machine, eyes tracking the growing light within its weapons.

"Engaging."

---

Nine Vipers moved into position.

The small, insectile machines slipped through maintenance shafts and narrow ventilation ducts, their segmented limbs finding purchase on seams scarcely wide enough to accommodate their claws. They moved without lights, hugging the darkness between thick bundles of cabling and coolant pipes, their movements lost beneath the constant vibration of the Indomitable's industrial machinery.

One by one, they settled into concealed positions overlooking the corridor, grappling mechanisms unfolding beneath their armored shells.

Farther back, beyond a reinforced bulkhead, a second Bastion lumbered into place.

Its four heavy legs settled against the deck, magnetic anchors engaging with a succession of muted clunks. The machine lowered its chassis, articulated limbs bracing against the surrounding structure as its internal systems began calculating the forces its frame would soon be required to withstand.

Nine Bishops.

Two Rooks.

Lucia watched their positioning settle into place, then turned her attention back to the golden warrior advancing down the corridor.

---

Mikhale hit the swarm like an icebreaker driving through a frozen sea.

Metal bodies broke against his advance, wolven machines scattering beneath the relentless momentum of his charge. Claws scraped uselessly across his armor as his guardian spear swept a path through the pack, its crackling blade carving through mechanical limbs and armored skulls with every motion.

Four strides brought him to the maintenance door, where he struck it shoulder-first.

The reinforced panel tore free of its hinges and flew across the compartment, smashing into a bank of shelving with a tremendous crash. Boxes spilled across the deck, their contents scattering beneath the buckling metal.

A storeroom. Small, cramped, its walls lined with racks of unmarked containers and industrial supplies. The cold overhead lumens flickered as dust and fragments of packaging filled the air.

No enemies. Mikhale barely registered the absence.

He crossed the room in two strides and hit the opposite door without slowing. Metal shrieked as the second panel buckled beneath his weight, its locking mechanisms torn from the frame.

Then he was through into another corridor.

He turned left, boots hammering against the deck as he accelerated. Behind him came the wolves, a tide of snapping jaws and metallic paws, their electrical projectors spitting pale lightning that crawled over his auramite and broke harmlessly against his recovering refractor field.

Another left turn.

The enormous quadrupedal weapons platform stood at the far end of the adjoining passage, its armored hindquarters exposed. Its three articulated plasma weapons were still oriented toward the corridor Mikhale had abandoned, their segmented arms attempting to rotate toward his new position.

They could not, not with the walls obstructing their firing arcs.

For a moment, Mikhale allowed himself a grin.

The swarm had followed him. The heavy platform was trying to reposition.

And neither had reacted quickly enough.

They had underestimated the speed of one of the Ten Thousand.

They were hardly the first enemy to make that mistake.

Nor would they be the last.

Six strides carried him into striking distance.

His spear swept forward, the power-field snarling as he drove its blade toward the vulnerable-looking articulation behind the platform's rear leg. He had selected the joint in the instant before striking, calculating the angle required to sever the supporting mechanism and bring the enormous machine crashing down.

The spear struck.

Blue light erupted across the weapon's edge.

Instead of penetrating, the blade skidded sideways, its energy scattering across an invisible curvature that shimmered into existence around the machine's chassis.

Mikhale adjusted his stance immediately. Behind him, the wolves were closing. Their claws struck the deck in a rising clatter, accompanied by the electric whine of their weapon systems.

Seconds away.

He tightened both hands around his spear and shifted his weight onto his forward left leg, preparing to drive a second, heavier strike into the same point.

Four metallic clunks sounded as something struck his right calf. His visor registered four separate impacts, each accompanied by a sharp vibration through his greave.

Mikhale glanced down.

Four taut lengths of metallic wire stretched from attachment points embedded in his lower leg toward a ventilation opening in the wall.

Inside the narrow duct, four pairs of blue optics stared back at him. Small, insectile machines clung to the interior plating, their segmented limbs braced against the walls. Their grappling mechanisms had deployed with mechanical precision, the cables already drawn tight.

Mikhale began to turn his spear.

Then his leg vanished beneath him as an enormous force ripped it sideways.

His right foot was wrenched sideways with such violence that his armored body twisted around the trapped limb. Agony erupted through his knee as the joint was torqued beyond anything its superhuman ligaments were designed to endure.

Auramite struck the deck with a shower of sparks.

Mikhale drove his spear downward, attempting to arrest the movement. Its energized blade punched effortlessly through the floor plating, slicing through metal that offered almost no resistance.

He snarled, more in frustration than pain, as the cables continued dragging him toward the wall.

His right calf slammed into the ventilation opening and metal buckled. The narrow frame distorted around his greave, armored plating grinding against the torn edges as the force hauled his leg deeper into the duct.

And through the wall, beneath the screaming metal and the strain of his own armor, Mikhale heard something else.

Four heavy footsteps.

Another weapons platform.

The realization came with terrible clarity.

The insectile machines were merely the anchors. Something much larger was pulling from the far side.

He could not reach it. The wall separated them, and his trapped leg was being drawn farther into the opening with every passing moment.

Rather than waste precious seconds attempting to overpower an unseen machine, Mikhale shortened his grip on the spear.

One sweep across the cables.

That was all he needed.

He began the strike.

Behind him, the first heavy platform reversed a fraction, its armored chassis shifting as all three segmented arms swung toward his position.

The spherical emitters aligned. Their centers brightened, three points of brilliant plasma gathering within the polished metal.

Mikhale abandoned the sweep, instead his spear rotated toward the new threat, the barrel of its adrathic weapon swinging into line as he prepared to fire.

Then the plasma whine stopped.

The sudden absence of sound lasted barely a heartbeat.

In it, he heard the clicking of metal paws.

Mikhale knew what was coming.

The wolves struck together.

A dozen mechanical bodies crashed over him, their weight driving him against the deck as saw-toothed jaws snapped at his armor and razor claws sought every seam. Electrical discharges flashed across his field, gold light strobing through the mass of tangled limbs.

He tried to drag his trapped leg free.

The cables held.

His spear stabbed upward, impaling one attacker and splitting another across the throat. He twisted the haft, attempting to clear enough space to rise, only for something to seize the weapon behind his grip.

For the first time in the engagement, his spear refused to answer his movement.

Mikhale released it.

His fists became weapons.

He drove a gauntlet through a mechanical skull, tore loose an articulated limb, and buried his elbow in the chassis of another attacker. His fingers found gaps in armor and ripped circuitry free by the handful.

Every movement destroyed something.

Every destroyed machine was replaced by another.

The pile grew heavier.

His refractor field flickered, golden light flashing between snapping jaws as warning runes crowded his visor. The pressure against his trapped leg increased. Claws scraped across his gorget, probing the narrow gap between helm and breastplate.

His breaths came faster.

His heartbeat rose.

And beneath the violence, beneath the fury of struggling metal and the relentless weight of the swarm, Mikhale understood.

He was not getting free.

"Brothers—"

His voice emerged strained over the vox, half lost beneath the grinding cacophony surrounding him.

Cold, unyielding fingers closed around the chin of his helmet.

Another set seized the crimson plume that had flown above him beneath the light of a thousand distant suns.

He strained against the grip, his remaining strength pouring into one last attempt to wrench himself free.

"Beware the vents."

A single, sharp crack sounded through the ruined corridor.

Death claimed the first of the Ten Thousand.

---

Cassian watched Mikhale die.

The life-sign indicator in the corner of his visor flickered once, its steady emerald glow turning an unforgiving crimson. A single, uninterrupted tone sounded over the vox as his brother's vital signs collapsed into a flat line.

For several heartbeats, Cassian continued staring at the icon.

He did not need to examine the vital signs of the others to know what they were feeling.

He had fought beside these warriors for centuries, trained with them beneath the vaulted halls of the Imperial Palace, and stood shoulder to shoulder with them upon battlefields whose names had long since faded from mortal memory. He knew the cadence of their movements, the particular manner in which each held his spear, the subtle changes in posture that betrayed irritation, satisfaction, or concern.

He remembered Mikhale's dry humor during the rare intervals between deployments. The countless contests of arms. The arguments over tactics that had continued long after the training blades were put away.

Such memories came unbidden.

And beneath them, something colder took hold.

Rage.

It burned through him with a purity that might have frightened a lesser warrior, a fury sharpened by the knowledge that one of the Emperor's own had fallen to machines lurking in the corridors of an Imperial vessel.

Cassian contained it.

Centuries of discipline closed around the emotion, holding it apart from the calculations that would determine what happened next.

He could not afford to let emotion dictate his actions.

There would be time enough for it.

But the rage remained.

Not quenched.

Not until the blood price had been exacted.

"Brothers." His voice carried across the squad vox, level and clear. "Form up around Brother Tormas. We march as one to the reactor core."

Acknowledgments answered from across the ship. Cassian closed the channel and continued down the corridor until he reached the intersection where the Ancient waited.

Tormas stood beneath the broad arch of a reinforced cargo passage, his enormous chassis nearly filling the available space. The crimson optics set within his armored helm regarded Cassian's approach.

Even motionless, he seemed a fortress unto himself.

Cassian stopped beside the Dreadnought.

They waited for the others.

"He was a good soldier." Tormas's voice emerged from the Dreadnought's vox-grilles, deep and resonant, the words carrying a weight that had little to do with the machinery producing them.

Cassian looked up.

The Ancient's crimson optics remained fixed upon the corridor ahead.

"Indeed."

For a while, neither spoke.

Then Tormas shifted, the movement accompanied by the quiet grinding of immense armored joints.

"Do you still wish to attempt a diplomatic overture?"

Cassian considered the question. "Yes."

He released a slow breath. "But circumstances have changed. Any offer must now be made from a position of strength."

Tormas inclined his massive head.

"Understood."

The first of their brothers appeared at the far end of the passage a short time later, golden armor catching the overhead lights as he approached. Others followed from adjoining corridors, guardian spears held ready, shields angled toward the darkness behind them.

They arrived without ceremony.

One by one, they took their places.

No one asked aloud after Mikhale.

Tormas moved to the front, the heavy tread of his armored feet sending vibrations through the deck. Behind him, the twelve Custodes arranged themselves in two columns, six warriors deep, shields overlapping where the corridor narrowed, their guardian spears angled to cover the approaches.

The corridor stretched ahead, descending into the immense industrial depths of the Forge-Tender. Overhead conduits vanished into the darkness, and distant machinery rumbled through the structure like the slow heartbeat of something impossibly vast.

One brother left behind.

Deeper into the Indomitable they went.

---

Deep within the Indomitable, Lucia watched the golden warriors gather around their ancient Dreadnought.

Their formation tightened, shields overlapping, spears covering the gaps between them. Where before they had advanced as separate hunters, they now moved as one, their determination evident in every measured step.

Her avatar's petals shifted thoughtfully.

They were learning.

So was she.

Far below, in the sterile white chambers of the surgical ward, overhead lumens brightened. Articulated surgical arms unfolded from their housings, instruments rotating into position as the examination tables came online. Diagnostic scanners swept across the motionless figure laid upon the central slab, their readings flowing directly into Lucia's awareness.

The golden armor had already been opened, its intricate construction carefully documented. Beneath it lay the body of one of the Emperor's Ten Thousand.

A remarkable specimen.

Lucia directed another set of instruments into position, their polished edges gleaming beneath the surgical lights.

There was much she needed to understand.

After all, know thy enemy.

---

Tormas raised his shield against another trio of plasma lances.

Three brilliant spears of concentrated energy struck the broad golden surface in rapid succession, bathing the corridor in blinding light. His power-field flared, its protective envelope straining beneath the impacts as the immense shield shuddered against his arm.

Through the artificial nerves connecting his sarcophagus to the Contemptor chassis, he felt the blows as heavy, distant vibrations.

Warning runes blossomed across his vision.

Shield integrity declining. Thermal accumulation rising. Structural fatigue spreading through the outer layers of his armor.

Tormas adjusted his stance, massive feet grinding against the deck as he absorbed the last impact.

Behind him, his brothers fought.

They were an insurmountable wall of flashing steel and implacable might, their golden armor illuminated by the constant flicker of weapons fire. Guardian spears thrust and swept through the advancing machines, power-fields shearing metal apart in showers of sparks. Swords flashed between the heavier blows, cutting through articulated limbs and mechanical bodies with ruthless precision.

In their wake lay a sea of scrap.

The wide industrial passage had become a graveyard of machinery. Tiny insectile constructs lay shattered beneath armored boots, their segmented bodies blown apart by bolter shells or reduced to molten ruin by adrathic beams. The wreckage of entire packs of mechanical wolves littered the deck, severed jaws still twitching around spinning saw-teeth, electrical projectors sputtering their last discharges into the surrounding debris.

Here and there, the enormous carcasses of the heavy weapons platforms blocked portions of the passage.

A dozen had fallen to Tormas's own blade.

He had crushed their armored bodies beneath his feet, split their chassis with his power sword, and smashed their articulated weapons apart with the massive face of his shield. Against foes of such size, his frame was an instrument of extraordinary destruction.

And his armor had allowed him to withstand their fire.

Mostly.

Another warning flickered across his vision, drawing his attention to the heat spreading through his breastplate.

Whatever method the enemy employed, their plasma weapons possessed a degree of concentration Tormas had rarely encountered. Even through his power-field and the immense layers of auramite and adamantium protecting his sarcophagus, they carved with brutal efficiency.

One lance struck for his chest.

Another swept low, seeking the actuators around his ankles. The third came for his head, its brilliance washing across his optics as he turned his shield to meet it.

Tormas answered with a single downward blow, his warblade splitting the nearest weapons platform through its central chassis.

The machine collapsed beneath him, its plasma emitters dying in a shower of blue sparks.

He stepped over the wreckage, thoughts percolating.

Something about the engagement had been troubling him for some time.

Against almost any other opponent, the force they had encountered would have been a nightmare. Well over a thousand machines of varying configurations had thrown themselves against the Custodes, combining heavy weapons, rapid assault units, and small infiltrators in coordinated attacks.

Yet since Cassian had ordered the brothers to consolidate around him, the enemy had changed its approach.

The attacks were smaller now.

Measured.

A handful of machines to force a halt. A weapons platform positioned to demand the expenditure of ammunition. A swarm directed against an exposed flank, only to withdraw the moment the Custodes brought their full strength to bear.

Tormas had little doubt they were being delayed.

And worse, the enemy was learning.

One ambush had come from an elevated maintenance gantry, its attackers concealed behind machinery that obscured conventional firing lines. Another had involved hidden sniper emplacements positioned at angles calculated to exploit the narrow gaps between shields. Elsewhere, drones had deployed chaff and thick thermal smoke, flooding the corridor with conflicting sensor returns before striking from behind reinforced industrial cover.

One particularly audacious attack had almost succeeded.

A group of the small insectile machines had dragged the severed plasma arm of a heavy weapons platform into a ventilation shaft above the passage. Tormas had been occupied with another wave of attackers when the weapon discharged almost directly into his skull.

Only a sudden turn of his head and the reflexive movement of his shield had prevented the beam from boring through his armored head.

He could still feel the damage through his artificial senses.

But the greater problem was their pace.

His brothers could have covered the distance to the reactor with extraordinary speed. Their armor and enhanced physiology allowed them to traverse industrial corridors in great bounding strides, to leap obstacles and exploit maintenance passages that would have been impassable to ordinary soldiers.

Tormas possessed no such freedom.

He was an anvil against which the enemy broke, a towering bulwark whose shield absorbed attacks that might otherwise have killed his brothers. His warblade could destroy the heaviest machines they had encountered, and his armor allowed him to stand beneath concentrations of fire that would have overwhelmed lesser vehicles.

Yet he remained an enormous metal frame, nearly fifteen feet tall and broad enough that many of the Forge-Tender's secondary passages were effectively closed to him.

Every narrow junction became a problem. Every maintenance corridor offered a possible shortcut his brothers could take, but he could not.

They had already been forced to detour around several such passages. Others could have been widened with power weapons, but cutting a route large enough for his chassis would have consumed even more precious time.

Their enemy knew the ship.

It knew the available routes, the dimensions of the corridors, and the places where the Custodes would have little choice but to advance.

And now it knew they would not separate.

Tormas considered the alternative.

Without his shield, the concentrated plasma lances he had intercepted would find the armor of his brothers. Even auramite had its limits, and enough precisely placed strikes would eventually reach the flesh beneath.

Without his brothers, the smaller machines would swarm his chassis. The insectile constructs were agile enough to climb his armored limbs, slip beneath vulnerable housings, and attack the inner mechanisms of his body. He could crush hundreds, perhaps thousands, but eventually one would reach something he could not afford to lose.

Then another.

And another.

Until there was nothing left of his mighty frame but a crippled monument to his own stubbornness.

He would have sighed, had he still possessed a throat with which to do so.

"Captain—"

"I know."

Cassian's voice came over the squad vox before Tormas could continue.

The Shield-Captain stood several paces behind him, his shield raised against the darkness ahead, guardian spear tracking the recesses between enormous coolant conduits.

"Neither option is perfect," Cassian continued. "But we advance as one. Slower, more predictable, but with our full might against whatever they throw at us."

Tormas tightened his metal fingers around the haft of his warblade. The enormous weapon answered with a low, hungry hum as its power-field intensified.

"Yes, sir."

He turned toward the corridor ahead.

"I shall clear us a path."

---

Lucia watched the intruders continue their advance through the main arteries of the Indomitable.

Golden figures moved steadily through the industrial corridors, their formation tight around the enormous Dreadnought at its head. They were heading directly toward the reactor core, and beyond it, the forges whose contents were even now being transferred, dismantled, or stripped for anything worth salvaging.

The Forge-Tender was coming apart around them.

Not through battle damage, though there was certainly plenty of that, but through the deliberate, methodical work of thousands of machines following an increasingly desperate schedule.

Across the warehouse decks, enormous cargo haulers drifted between towering stacks of raw materials. Gravitic lifting fields hummed beneath containers weighing dozens of tons, while articulated loading arms reached down from overhead gantries to transfer metals, composites, and industrial feedstocks onto waiting platforms. The air shivered with the vibration of working machinery, warning lights sweeping across the cavernous chambers as cargo moved toward the shipyard.

There would be nowhere near enough room to take it all.

Elsewhere, through the narrower passages buried between the ship's great industrial compartments, the people of Dusthaven-nearly all women and children-were being evacuated.

Sentinels guided them through maintenance corridors and secondary access ways, their armored frames forming protective ranks around the small procession. Aegis drones hovered close, their circular bodies humming softly as shield fields shimmered around the civilians.

Lucia watched a young woman shift a sleeping child higher against her shoulder. An older woman struggled briefly with an overstuffed bag before a Sentinel stooped to take it from her. Farther along, two children walked hand in hand between the legs of a towering machine, craning their heads upward to follow the gentle movement of its glowing optics.

Some carried bags hastily filled with clothing and a few treasured possessions. Others had brought almost nothing.

Lucia had ensured they were kept well away from the Custodes.

The longer routes would cost her precious minutes, but the alternative was unthinkable. The golden warriors were still advancing, and she had no intention of letting them discover a corridor full of frightened civilians.

Above them all, concealed within the vast shipyard, the new cruiser was slowly approaching readiness.

Nearly all of her construction drones labored aboard and around its incomplete hull, welding structural members into place, fitting the last essential systems, testing connections and hastily sealing compartments that had never been intended to see service so soon.

The stellar core was coming online.

Soon the engines and shields would follow.

Soon, if the calculations held, they could leave.

Behind the advancing Custodes, other construction drones moved through the wreckage of battle. Mechanical claws gathered the shattered remains, loading broken chassis and severed limbs onto recycling platforms. What could be repaired would be repaired. What could not would be stripped for components or fed back into the fabrication systems.

Still others were dismantling the Indomitable itself.

Auxiliary generators, manufacturing equipment, replacement components, and the countless useful additions she and Koron had spent months installing were being torn from their housings and carried toward the shipyard.

Every recovered kilogram mattered.

Every passing second mattered more.

And despite all that frantic activity, two problems remained.

The first was by far the more important.

The medical pods.

Deep within the medical decks, the remaining Dusthaveners lay suspended in their life-support capsules, unaware of the battle unfolding around them.

Rows of sealed containers stood beneath the cool white glow of surgical lumens, their sensors revealing bodies undergoing transformations that would have been inconceivable to most Imperial physicians. Nutrient lines and surgical manipulators disappeared into their housings, while diagnostic displays tracked the careful progression of genetic alterations and cybernetic integration.

Their new organs were still growing.

Nervous systems were being rebuilt. Artificial interfaces were bonding with living tissue. Entire sequences of genetic correction remained incomplete, dependent upon a continuous supply of energy, nutrients, and precisely measured medical intervention.

And the pods had never been designed to move.

Why would they have been?

The Indomitable was supposed to be their refuge. The treatments had been planned around the assumption of a stable environment, uninterrupted power, and the full resources of the medical ward.

Four more days.

That was how much time they needed before the procedures would be complete.

Lucia did not have four days.

She was trying to design a mobile support system around equipment that had never been intended to leave its foundations. Portable generators, independent life-support loops, feedstock reservoirs, vibration compensation, emergency surgical redundancies.

Every possible disruption had to be considered.

A brief power interruption might kill a patient whose new organs were not yet functioning independently. An unexpected change in pressure could rupture delicate surgical connections. Even a momentary interruption to the nutrient supply might have consequences that could not be reversed.

And Lucia would have to keep every pod functioning while moving them through an active industrial evacuation.

Her calculations branched into thousands of possible solutions.

Most failed.

Others required components she did not possess, time she could not spare, or risks she was unwilling to impose upon people who had trusted her family with their lives.

Her petals tightened.

It was slow going.

Which brought her to the second problem.

The considerably more stupid problem.

Koron's goddamn mecha.

The half-finished giant still rested in its forge cradle, surrounded by scaffolding, suspended tool assemblies, and thick cables trailing from the unfinished machinery of its upper body.

It was an enormous, expensive monument to her father's enthusiasm for building things before he had finished building all the other things required to build them.

Most of its systems were offline.

Its entire upper half was unarmored—hell, unskinned—nothing but the immense skeletal framework that would eventually carry the remaining machinery and protective plating. Exposed actuators hung beneath unfinished shoulder assemblies, heavy mechanical arms dangling uselessly at its sides.

Even in that condition, the engineering intelligence that could be recovered from the machine would be astronomical by Imperial standards.

Leaving it behind was not an option she was particularly willing to contemplate.

Her avatar's rose-petal leaves fluttered in irritation.

Fine.

If she wanted the damned thing moved, she would move it herself.

Lucia poured a portion of her awareness into the unfinished chassis.

Systems awakened in rapid succession.

A quantum-flux reactor stirred deep within the machine's armored lower body, its containment fields stabilizing as power flowed into the surrounding systems. Diagnostic lights flickered across exposed structural members, followed by the deep, resonant hum of machinery receiving energy for the first time.

Actuators engaged.

Tension coils tightened.

Gravity plates cycled through their initial calibrations.

The thirty-foot framework shuddered within its restraints as mechanical systems came alive, one after another.

Her arms remained limp.

The upper body's control systems were incomplete, their connections sufficient for basic diagnostics and little more. Heavy manipulators hung from their shoulders, incapable of doing anything useful beyond contributing an enormous amount of inconvenient weight.

The lower body, at least, responded.

Behind her, the forty-foot whipcord tail lifted from its cradle, hundreds of articulated segments flexing in sequence. Overlapping plates slid across one another with millimeters of clearance, their movements smooth enough that the entire appendage seemed almost organic.

Lucia curled it experimentally.

Then straightened it.

Excellent.

Her attention shifted downward.

Three enormous industrial claws flexed against the cradle's support platform, metal toes spreading and contracting as she tested their individual response.

The digitigrade knees bent. Tension built through the leg assemblies, the machinery answering her commands with pleasing precision.

Everything appeared to be functioning within acceptable parameters.

Her avatar nodded.

Lucia released the forge clamps. Heavy restraints disengaged around the chassis, hydraulic assemblies drawing back into the surrounding scaffolding with a succession of metallic clunks.

She shifted her weight, commanded the legs forward, and stepped out of the cradle.

She promptly fell flat on her face.

The impact reverberated through the forge.

Metal screamed against metal as the enormous machine struck the deck, its unfinished upper framework shuddering beneath the collision. Several diagnostic lights flashed red. Somewhere behind her, a disconnected cable snapped free of its housing and swung lazily against the scaffolding.

Lucia glared at the floor.

Her HUD was already filling with warnings. Structural stress. Minor deformation. Actuator overload. Secondary impact damage.

She could read every diagnostic perfectly. She understood the function of every component, the tolerances of every joint, the mathematics governing the distribution of weight through the entire chassis.

None of which changed one deeply inconvenient fact.

She had never actually walked before.

Her drones walked, certainly.

Sentinels, Vipers, Bastions, and all the countless other mechanical bodies she commanded were more than capable of moving themselves around.

But their onboard motor controllers and limited intelligences handled the fundamental processes of locomotion. They balanced their own bodies, adjusted their strides, compensated for uneven terrain, and corrected their movements without requiring her constant attention.

Lucia told them where to go.

They handled the walking.

Here?

Here, the unfinished mecha had no such luxury.

Every adjustment was hers to make.

And despite possessing enough computational power to coordinate an entire army, she had precisely zero practical experience controlling a body with legs.

Her petals curled inward.

Well. This is irritating.

The arms were useless, so she turned her attention to the tail.

It snapped downward, striking the deck with a heavy clang. Using it as a brace, Lucia drew her right leg inward, shifted her weight, and awkwardly rolled the enormous frame onto its left side.

Progress.

She brought both legs beneath herself, placing the three-clawed feet against the deck and pushing until the machine began to rise.

For a moment, she reached her knees.

Then the unsupported upper body started tipping backward.

Shitshitshit!

The tail struck the floor again.

Lucia caught herself just before the entire chassis toppled over, the articulated appendage bowing beneath the weight as she hastily recalculated her balance.

Right.

That, too, was going to be a problem.

Slowly, carefully, she repositioned one foot beneath the machine.

The leg's tension coils compressed as the mecha's considerable weight settled upon them, springs and actuators loading with a deep mechanical groan.

Lucia held the position.

Her viewpoint remained fixed mostly on the ceiling. The unfinished arms hung uselessly at her sides, their weight tugging at the upper frame whenever she attempted to adjust her posture. Every tiny correction seemed to create three new problems somewhere else.

She needed to move forward.

Forward required a step.

A step required coordinating the knees, hips, ankles, and the shifting center of mass.

She understood all of that.

Executing it was proving considerably less straightforward.

So she chose a simpler solution.

Keeping one leg firmly planted beneath her, Lucia raised the other straight out in front of herself.

Hip height.

Knee locked.

Three enormous claws extended into empty space.

Then she deliberately let herself fall forward.

For a brief, alarming moment, the unfinished giant pitched toward the deck.

Its weight shifted.

The extended leg descended.

The heel-toe assembly struck metal with a thunderous clang, the three forward claws spreading wide as gravitic tension coils compressed and the enormous machinery absorbed the impact.

The chassis rocked.

Lucia threw the tail backward, correcting the last of the movement.

And remained upright.

Her avatar went very still.

Then, slowly, the petals of her rose brightened.

Her first step.

---

"Captain."

Hexal's voice came over the vox, interrupting Cassian's study of the corridor ahead. "The Auric Mantle is reporting a significant power buildup in the Indomitable's shipyard."

Cassian frowned beneath his helm.

"The frigate?"

He called up the reconnaissance images supplied before their arrival. A partially completed Imperial warship hung within the Forge-Tender's construction cradle, its familiar silhouette surrounded by gantries, loading platforms, and the immense machinery required to assemble a vessel of such scale.

"Our scans didn't show any other ships in the construction cradle, and that frigate doesn't even have engines. Can they pinpoint the source?"

"Not directly, sir. Auspex is having little success penetrating the frigate's hull."

Cassian considered that. An incomplete warship, incapable of independent flight, should not have required the activation of anything substantial enough to draw the attention of the Auric Mantle's sensorium.

Particularly now.

"And your systems?"

"Nothing useful, Captain. I'm positive I'm being actively locked out." Hexal's voice carried a trace of irritation, the sort Cassian had rarely heard from his brother outside the training halls. "However, I suspect the energy spike in the shipyard may indicate a secondary egress. And even if it does not—"

"We must discover what it is before our enemy turns it against us."

Cassian glanced toward the tactical display floating at the edge of his vision. The shipyard was positioned above their current location, accessible through the broad industrial arteries that connected the Forge-Tender's manufacturing decks.

Another route.

Another objective.

Another opportunity for the intelligence directing the ship's defenses to dictate where they would fight.

"Good work. Out."

He closed the channel.

"Company, halt."

The order rang through the corridor.

Before its final syllable had faded, the Custodes were already moving. Their advance stopped as a single coordinated action, shields turning outward while guardian spears swept the surrounding passages. Golden armor shifted into a defensive ring around Tormas, every warrior adjusting his position to cover his brothers.

The heavy tread of the Dreadnought ceased.

For the first time in several minutes, the corridor fell almost quiet.

Mikhale's death remained displayed upon Cassian's HUD, a crimson marker that no amount of discipline could render insignificant.

He did not intend to lose another brother through carelessness.

Yet he could not permit an unidentified vessel, or some other powerful device, to become operational while they concentrated solely upon the reactor.

"The Mantle has detected what may be a ship-scale reactor activation in the construction yard above us," he began. A schematic appeared across the squad's shared tactical display, marking the reactor complex below and the distant shipyard above it. "If this is the enemy's evacuation route, it follows that it will be the most heavily defended approach."

His gaze shifted toward the Dreadnought.

"Tormas, you shall command Squad Two. Proceed to the shipyard, intercept the enemy's suspected evacuation route, and secure whatever is responsible for that energy signature."

He paused, allowing the orders to settle.

"I shall lead Squad One to the Indomitable's main reactor and shut it down."

Tormas inclined his massive head. "Affirmative, Captain." The Ancient raised his warblade in salute, its energized edge casting a faint shimmer across his armor.

"Good hunting."

Cassian returned the gesture with his guardian spear.

"And you."

Around them, the formation began to divide.

Shields turned toward separate corridors. Spears shifted into new defensive positions. The heavy footsteps of the Dreadnought resumed, their rhythmic impacts slowly receding toward the industrial passages leading to the shipyard.

Cassian watched his brothers go.

Then he turned toward the reactor.

"Squad One. With me."

---

Lucia watched the Custodes divide.

The golden formation separated with practiced precision, twelve warriors splitting into two squads of six. One group turned toward the reactor complex, disappearing into the narrower industrial passages, while the other advanced along the great cargo thoroughfares of the Forge-Tender.

At their head lumbered the Dreadnought.

Each ponderous step sent a faint vibration through the deck, its immense armored frame still failing to even come close to filling the passages designed to accommodate the movement of Titan components. Behind it, six golden warriors maintained their formation, shields raised and spears covering the intersections as they advanced toward the shipyard.

Toward her family.

Lucia's petals shifted.

Two more Custodes remained on the command bridge, their attempts to penetrate the ship's systems making little progress. A dozen Prometheus drones hovered within the adjoining maintenance spaces, their processors working in concert to intercept, dissect, and counter the intrusion software being fed into the local noosphere.

Every malicious code packet was isolated, examined, and discarded or redirected before it could reach anything important. Whenever the intruders attempted a different approach, the Promethuses adjusted their countermeasures.

But the Custodes themselves were not what concerned her.

It was whatever waited at the other end of their encrypted connection.

Something out there was generating intrusion routines with a sophistication she had not expected from the Imperium. It was persistent, adaptable, and remarkably difficult to characterize from the fragments her countermeasures managed to capture.

Whatever intelligence was feeding the Custodes their weapons, Lucia had no intention of allowing it anywhere near her core systems.

Her avatar shook its flowering trunk, scattering a few glowing petals through the simulated air.

She partitioned the problem into a dedicated subroutine, allocating enough processing capacity to continue analyzing the intrusion without distracting her from more immediate concerns.

The rest of her attention returned to the evacuation.

The mobile Dusthaveners were aboard the unnamed cruiser, having made the journey through the ship's hidden passages, shepherded by Sentinels and protected by Aegis drones. They were being settled into compartments that had been intended for a military crew, the narrow corridors crowded with hastily gathered belongings, tired children, and frightened adults doing their best to remain calm.

The ship was almost ready.

Deep within its unfinished hull, the stellar core continued its controlled ascent toward operational output. Containment fields stabilized around the immense energy source, while power spread through the vessel's primary distribution network.

Shield generators were coming online. Propulsion systems followed, their first activation cycles sending low, resonant vibrations through the surrounding construction cradle.

Lucia watched the diagnostic figures climb.

Good. Not perfect. Not even close to perfect.

But enough, if everything held together.

The remaining construction drones were still stripping the Indomitable of whatever could be salvaged in time. Entire fabrication assemblies had been dismantled and transported toward the cruiser, while cargo haulers continued moving raw materials from the warehouses.

Even so, she would have to leave several million tons behind.

Useful metals. Industrial feedstocks. Replacement components. Machinery she and Koron had spent months repairing, refining, and installing.

It hurt.

Not nearly as much as losing the people aboard would hurt, but it hurt all the same.

There simply wasn't time.

Her attention shifted for a fraction of a second as an entirely different set of warnings appeared.

An impact was detected as the unfinished mecha's shoulder slammed into the wall.

Lucia hastily corrected its balance, the thirty foot tall machine lurching sideways as one digitigrade knee failed to absorb the weight of her latest step. Its forty-foot tail snapped outward, striking the opposite wall with a tremendous clang and digging into the metal to prevent the upper body from toppling over.

A shower of sparks fell across the deck as, for a moment, the enormous frame stood wedged awkwardly between the two walls.

Lucia stared at the damage notifications.

Her petals drooped.

Hover, she grumbled to herself. She shifted the tail, experimentally adjusting the machine's center of mass.

My mecha is going hovermode.

Walking was a ridiculous means of transportation. She had absolutely no idea why organics insisted on doing so much of it. Another thought-string returned with the latest calculations from the medical ward.

And the ugly, vicious mathematics struck her squarely in the proverbial jaw.

The medical pods.

She reviewed the figures again.

Then a third time.

Nothing changed.

They wouldn't make it.

The portable life-support assemblies remained incomplete. Several of the patients were undergoing particularly delicate stages of genetic modification, while others depended upon continuous surgical intervention to keep their new organs and cybernetic interfaces functioning.

Moving them prematurely could kill them.

Leaving them aboard the Indomitable would place them directly in the path of the Custodes.

And the remaining time was slipping away.

Too many complications.

Too many dependencies.

Too many opportunities for a well-intentioned attempt to keep the Dusthaveners out of Imperial hands to end with the very people she was trying to protect dying beneath her care.

Lucia stared at the projected timelines.

The figures continued to converge upon the same conclusion.

Her existing plan was failing.

For a moment, the rose of her avatar went very still.

She thought of the children already aboard the cruiser, of the people sleeping in the medical pods, of the strange little family Koron had gathered around himself.

She thought of Sasha.

And of something Sasha would undoubtedly say if she were here.

When all you have is a losing hand—

Lucia's petals curled inward.

Their soft glow darkened as she turned her attention toward one of the last pieces she had deliberately held in reserve.

Flip the fucking table.

Deep within the Indomitable's forges, thirty dormant machines received their activation commands.

Restraints disengaged.

Power flooded through compact reactors, feeding gravitic manipulators, defensive fields, and weapons designed for enemies that did not obey the ordinary laws of flesh or physics.

Long, skeletal limbs unfolded from their resting positions. Segmented tails flexed, concealed blades sliding silently into position beneath overlapping armor.

Thirty pairs of metal feet settled softly upon the deck.

Thirty cyclopean crimson eyes opened in the darkness.

Her Harrows.

Her Knights.

Lucia regarded the tactical display for one final moment, tracking the divided Custodes as they advanced toward their separate objectives.

Then she gave her Knights a single order.

Hunt.

---

Cassian hated everything about the causeway before him.

The bridge stretched across an immense industrial void, a single span of reinforced metal suspended hundreds of feet above the machinery below. Its surface was broad enough to accommodate the passage of a Warhound Titan, heavy railway tracks embedded in the deck and flanked by thick guardrails that seemed almost insultingly inadequate given the drop beyond them.

Nearly half a mile separated the Custodes from the opposite side.

Beyond the span, the railway continued through a cavernous opening in the far bulkhead, disappearing into the labyrinth of industrial infrastructure surrounding the reactor complex.

The builders of the Forge-Tender had apparently decided that one of the principal arteries used to transport Titans should run directly alongside the vessel's primary reactor.

Cassian understood why.

The awakening of a god-engine was no small undertaking. Titan activation sequences could demand enormous electrical surges, and proximity to the main reactor would simplify the transfer of such prodigious quantities of power.

An eminently practical arrangement.

From an engineering perspective.

From a tactical perspective, it was an abomination.

There was no cover. No convenient maintenance passage along the sides. No secondary crossing visible through the immense open chamber.

Only a broad, exposed strip of metal stretching into the distance, barely a dozen body lengths wide, with hundreds of feet of empty air waiting on either side.

Far below, heavy machinery continued its tireless labor. Enormous pistons moved through their cycles, coolant pipes gleamed beneath industrial lumens, and banks of machinery disappeared into a haze of heat and drifting vapor.

Above, suspended maintenance platforms and reinforced gantries hung in the gloom, their structural supports casting long shadows across the causeway.

Cassian studied every one of them.

The elevated positions. The open firing lanes. The lack of cover. The distance his brothers would have to cross.

Even the bridge itself was suspect. Its operating mechanisms were presumably linked to the same shipwide systems that had been opening doors and manipulating gravity elsewhere aboard the vessel.

If there was a more perfect place to establish a killzone, Cassian had never encountered it.

"Thoughts?" he asked, even as he kept his gaze on the far end of the bridge.

"Charge across, clear the open ground?" Ulysses offered.

The Custodian stood to his right, his guardian spear resting easily in one hand. His thumb traced the ornate grooves worked into the weapon's haft, an idle habit Cassian had observed countless times during the long intervals between battles.

"Half a mile is nothing. We can cover that in twenty seconds."

"Yes," Alkimos replied, "but twenty seconds is a long time. Especially for a machine." His shield remained angled toward the empty span, his helm slowly tracking the overhead gantries. "And if we are caught out in the open there..."

"Going around will take longer," Lycaon interjected. "And without proper schematics of the ship, we have no way of knowing whether any route exists that avoids this gap entirely."

He looked from one brother to the next.

"A risk, yes. But what is our life but risk?"

"A risk we can avoid is possibly a brother's life saved," Alkimos countered.

His voice carried no accusation, merely the calm certainty of a warrior who had spent centuries learning which dangers were worth accepting.

"And we have already seen proof that these foes can cut our threads."

"Indeed." Cassian studied the bridge once more. "And even the ground beneath our feet is suspect. But as Lycaon said, the sooner we take the reactor, the sooner we can force a surrender."

A half-turn brought him face-to-face with his five brothers.

"Any who wish to remain as rearguard, stay. Any who wish to take the risk, with me."

For a heartbeat, the Custodes regarded one another.

Then Alkimos reached out and smacked Cassian's pauldron with one massive gauntlet. There was a grin in his voice.

"Dressing up calling me a coward does not mean I shall fail to notice it."

Cassian returned the blow, the impact ringing against Alkimos's armor.

"I did not consider it cowardice. Merely tactical acumen."

"Oh, I'll call you a coward," Lycaon announced.

He drew his shortsword a few inches from its sheath, inspected the polished blade with exaggerated seriousness, then slid it home again.

"But we can settle the stain upon your honor once we are back on Terra."

Alkimos turned his helm toward him.

Cassian could almost imagine the expression beneath it.

Cassian permitted himself the faintest smile before he turned back toward the bridge.

"On my mark."

He lowered his center of gravity, bending his knees as his shield rose and his guardian spear settled into position.

Behind him, his brothers mirrored the movement.

Six golden giants crouched at the edge of the span, armored feet braced against the railway decking. Power-fields whispered along the edges of their weapons, and targeting runes flickered across their visors as each selected his approach.

Cassian drew a single breath.

Filled his lungs.

"Mark!"

They moved.

Six blurs exploded across the causeway.

Armored boots hammered against the metal decking, every stride devouring impossible distances as the Custodes accelerated.

They could have outrun most ground vehicles. They could have smashed through walls of reinforced steel without breaking stride.

And for the first few heartbeats, the bridge remained empty.

Then six figures appeared from thin air.

Cassian's targeting systems reacted instantly.

The newcomers stood directly in their path, motionless for the briefest fraction of a second. They were shorter than the Custodes, though not by much, and so similar in appearance that they might have been produced from a single mold.

Their bodies were skeletal, almost emaciated in proportion, with broad angular shoulders narrowing into impossibly thin waists. Long arms hung beside narrow torsos, while digitigrade legs supported their frames upon sharp, articulated feet. Segmented tails extended behind them, each moving with a faint, serpentine restlessness.

Their heads were particularly unsettling.

Sharp and angular, lacking anything Cassian could recognize as a conventional face, they bore two long, thin vanes where ears might have been. The projections twitched independently, making tiny adjustments as the machines studied the approaching warriors.

A single crimson eye glowed in the center of each narrow skull.

At first glance, they appeared empty-handed.

Cassian did not believe that for an instant.

A faint shimmer of red caught his eye.

It lasted scarcely a fraction of a moment, a ripple of distorted light spreading along the machines limbs.

Refracted—

No.

Bent.

The light itself seemed to curve around something that was not quite visible.

All six machines hips dropped into low, predatory stances, tails snapping from side to side as thin crimson distortions rose alongside their empty hands.

Blades.

Nearly invisible, their edges betrayed only by the light bending around them.

The entire sequence unfolded in less than half a second.

Then the Custodes met their foes.

Cassian's shield snapped forward, his spear aligning with the nearest machine's narrow chest. He was already calculating the thrust required to pierce its central mass when something disturbed the air above him.

A faint displacement. Little more than a waft moving against the steady current blowing from the right side of the Titan railway.

But it was wrong.

Cassian threw himself into a tight roll.

The world spun as his armor struck the deck, his shield sweeping across his body while something descended through the space his head had occupied a heartbeat earlier.

Metal screamed.

A second skeletal machine had appeared above him, its momentum carrying it downward with terrifying speed. Two translucent blades buried themselves to the hilts in the reinforced causeway, their edges parting metal as easily as wet clay.

Cassian twisted through the roll and came up with his spear ready.

Around him, his brothers were reacting.

Golden armor shifted in blinding flashes as the Custodes evaded attacks that had arrived from impossible angles. Shields rose. Guardian spears swept through the air. The clang of metal upon metal rang across the open chamber, almost lost beneath the distant thunder of industrial machinery.

They had all avoided the ambush—

Almost all.

Lycaon's head rolled across the deck.

For an instant, Cassian saw it clearly: the ornate helm turning upon the metal plating, the crimson plume dragging behind it, the cleanly severed neck beneath looking almost cauterized.

The machine crouched upon his brother's shoulders.

Its skeletal legs were folded beneath it, the single red optic fixed upon the remaining Custodes. Its invisible blades hung loosely at its sides, their surfaces carrying no trace of blood.

Lycaon's body began to fall.

Cassian had already drawn breath.

"Back to back!"

The surviving Custodes moved at once.

Ulysses and Alkimos closed upon Cassian, their shields turning outward as the three formed a tight defensive knot. The remaining pair fell into step beside them, every warrior adjusting his stance to cover the angles his brothers could no longer defend alone.

Their movements were immediate.

Practiced.

But the machines were just as quick.

More distortions rippled through the air.

Six additional figures appeared around the formation, their arrival marked by faint crimson shimmers and brief displacements in the surrounding atmosphere.

Twelve skeletal machines now encircled the five surviving Custodes.

Their crimson optics burned steadily.

They gave no warning.

No challenge.

No indication that they felt anything resembling fear.

Their tails rose, and spat twelve streams of burning gel across the gathered Custodes.

Flame washed over golden armor, clinging to shields, greaves, and exposed joints as the sticky incendiary spread across their warplate. The burning substance spat and hissed against armor seals, licking around the housings of refractor-field emitters and filling the air with oily black smoke.

Cassian's vision flashed crimson as damage warnings populated his HUD. Thermal overload, field interference, seal degradation. Golden light flickered beneath the flames as his refractor field struggled against the sustained assault.

"Break!" Cassian roared.

He surged forward, driving his shield between himself and the nearest attacker. His guardian spear barked, the built-in bolter hammering a succession of explosive shells into the machine's narrow torso.

Sparks scattered as blue light flared around its frame, staggering the machine, but it remained upright.

Cassian closed the remaining distance and thrust his spear toward its chest, the opening attack intended to impale the machine and carry him smoothly into a second strike against the next opponent.

The blade met resistance again.

A curved field of pale blue energy blossomed before the machine, catching the power weapon along its surface. Crimson distortions flickered as the machine's knees bent, its narrow body folding backward with a flexibility no natural humanoid spine should have possessed.

Then it hurled itself up and away. The machine twisted in midair, rotating around its own center of mass while its limbs adjusted independently. It drifted backward beyond his spear's reach, its trajectory changing with an abruptness that reminded Cassian of the damned Eldar and their gravity-belts.

For a fraction of a second, it seemed to hang in the air.

Then its feet touched down as easily as he might have walked down a staircase.

Cassian adjusted his grip.

Another trick discovered.

His vox opened, and static shrieked through Cassian's ears, a piercing assault of broken signals and electronic interference. Whatever transmission had been attempting to reach him dissolved into a wash of meaningless noise.

He cursed.

Then instinct screamed.

Cassian drove the haft of his spear backward, putting the full strength of his arm behind the blow.

Something struck the weapon with a heavy metallic clang.

A skeletal machine went skidding across the causeway, its limbs scraping against the railway tracks as sparks erupted beneath its frame.

Cassian turned with the motion.

The fallen machine's tail snapped toward him, its segmented length twisting across the deck with a speed that belied its apparent weight. Along both edges, concealed mechanisms opened, revealing a chain of rapidly spinning teeth that shrieked as they met his shield.

He slammed the shield downward. Auramite struck steel with a deafening crash, pinning the weapon against the deck as the saw-teeth chewed furiously against its reinforced edge.

His spear followed.

The blade punched through its exposed chassis, driving deep into the machinery beneath. Bracing his weight upon the spear and shield, Cassian snapped a vicious kick to his left, catching the first machine as it lunged toward him again.

The blow sent it staggering backward.

Beneath his shield, the severed section of tail spasmed once.

Then the saw-teeth slowed, and thousands of tiny cutting edges became visible as the mechanism sputtered and died, each one designed to chew through armor and flesh with mechanical indifference.

An ugly weapon.

Cassian could respect its lethality all the same.

A tremendous crash sounded to his right.

One of the foes struck the deck in two pieces, its torso split apart by Alkimos's spear. The ruined machine twitched between the railway tracks, pale blue light flickering around its shattered defensive field.

For a heartbeat, Cassian grinned.

Alkimos had always been particularly difficult to impress in the training cages.

Apparently, the machines were discovering why.

Cassian drew his spear back, the weapon's bolter thundering as he fired into another downed enemy.

Four explosive shells hammered against the machine's protective field, blue light flaring with each successive impact until the barrier collapsed. The final rounds tore through the exposed chassis, scattering fragments of metal, cabling, and shattered internal components across the deck.

The machine went still.

Cassian allowed himself a single glance toward his brothers.

All four remained standing.

More importantly, each had managed to bring down at least one attacker.

The machines were dangerous. Their unfamiliar weapons and astonishing mobility had already claimed Lycaon, but they could be killed.

The realization offered a momentary satisfaction.

And nearly cost Cassian his throat.

Movement flashed at the edge of his vision. Pain lanced across his thigh as an invisible blade sliced through the outer layers of his armor, its edge carving a narrow seam through the plate. He twisted instinctively, knees bending as his spine arched backward.

A second blade passed across his throat.

Cold air touched the skin of his neck as his undersuit parted.

The blade missed flesh by scarcely a hair.

Cassian's spear snapped upward.

Blue light flashed as the machine's defensive field caught the weapon, the protective curvature splintering beneath the impact.

Driving forward with all the momentum of his armored body, Cassian smashed his forehead into the machine's angular skull.

Its single crimson optic shattered. Fragments of the lens burst outward as the machine's head snapped backward, its neck bending beneath the immense force.

Cassian's shield came around in the same motion. The reinforced edge struck the machine across the throat, crushing the mechanical structure beneath.

Metal folded, his foe collapsed.

Cassian stepped through its falling body, turning toward Alkimos.

His brother was fighting another of the skeletal machines, the machine's limbs moving with impossible flexibility as it struggled to keep the Custodian at bay.

A stream of burning gel erupted from its tail.

Cassian charged straight through it. Flames washed over his armor, clinging to his greaves and shield as his refractor field flared gold beneath the burning substance. Heat warnings flashed across his visor, but he ignored them.

Alkimos saw him coming.

No word passed between them.

Their foe found itself caught between two Custodes. Its arms became a blur, translucent blades catching and deflecting the blows directed toward its torso. Its segmented tail lashed low at their legs, the flamethrower spitting intermittent bursts of burning gel across their vision.

Yet the machine did not teleport away.

Instead, it relied upon its gravitic manipulators and unnatural flexibility, twisting and bending through the narrow gaps left between the Custodes' attacks.

Cassian noted the decision.

Perhaps the teleportation required preparation.

Perhaps there was some limitation he had yet to discover.

Whatever the reason, the machine had chosen to remain within reach.

A mistake.

Cassian drove his spear downward.

Its arms rose to intercept, their translucent blades meeting the snarling weapon in a shower of blue sparks.

He struck again, each overhead attack forcing the machine's guard higher, its narrow body bending beneath the relentless pressure.

Across from him, Alkimos kept the tail occupied, his spear striking at the segmented appendage whenever it attempted to coil around their legs.

Cassian could see the end approaching.

It was fast.

It was strong.

Its weapons could kill either of them with a single well-placed strike.

But there were two Custodes attacking it from opposing directions, and their movements flowed together with the effortless coordination of warriors who had fought side by side for centuries.

Cassian gave it an opening.

His shield drifted a fraction farther from his body than before, leaving an apparent gap beneath his raised arm.

The machine took it.

One translucent blade snapped toward his exposed flank, the machine committing its weight to the strike.

Cassian shifted, letting the blade carry past him.

And Alkimos moved.

Two bolter shells struck the defensive field in rapid succession. Blue light erupted around its torso, and the barrier fractured. Alkimos's spear followed through the opening, its energized blade shearing into the machine's narrow waist and splitting its mechanical spine.

It collapsed between them.

For an instant, Cassian met his brother's gaze through their gilded visors, a single short nod given.

Then they turned and ran toward the others.

Seven remained.

And his brothers were bleeding.

Ulysses had lost his left arm at the elbow.

The limb was gone entirely, the ruined armor ending in a smooth stump beneath which his transhuman physiology fought to seal the injury. Blood darkened the gold of his warplate, yet he still wielded his spear with his remaining hand, every movement as deliberate and deadly as before.

Dissues had suffered grievously as well.

His spear was gone, and half his left foot had been sheared away. He favored the damaged limb, blood marking each uneven step, but continued fighting with the grim determination of a warrior unwilling to yield even an inch.

Mallus stood nearby, his shield split nearly through its center. A deep wound ran across his chest, blood seeping from the rent where one of the translucent blades had cut through his armor.

His breathing was heavy, but his spear remained steady.

His brothers still fought.

Cassian and Alkimos opened fire as they charged.

Explosive shells streaked across the causeway, hammering into the foes pressing Dissues and Ulysses. Their blue defensive fields flared under the impacts, forcing the machines to recoil and giving the wounded Custodes a precious moment to recover their footing.

Then the two newcomers struck the enemy's flanks.

For a moment, Cassian felt the old, familiar rhythm of battle settle around him.

The ebb and flow of close combat. The instinctive awareness of his brother's positions. The confidence born of centuries spent facing enemies that believed themselves capable of matching the Ten Thousand.

Cassian pressed forward beside Ulysses, and together they drove one of the machines backward, their spears striking in alternating patterns that denied the machine any opportunity to counterattack.

It twisted between them, narrow limbs bending through impossible angles as its tail lashed desperately at their legs.

Step by step, they forced it toward the railing.

Its back struck the reinforced barrier.

Cassian's spear snapped forward.

Ulysses's followed.

The two blades crossed before the machine's chest, trapping it against the metal rail, their crackling points hovering inches from its single crimson eye.

For an instant, it was pinned.

Then it struck.

The machine's leg snapped upward with astonishing force, its clawed heel crashing into Cassian's breastplate. He felt the blow through his armor. A tremendous impact, far beyond what such a slender mechanical frame should have been capable of producing.

His boots left the deck. Cassian skidded backward several feet, sparks spraying from his greaves as he fought to recover his balance. He was already moving forward again when he saw the machine change.

A succession of sharp clicks sounded from within its shoulders.

Armor plates shifted.

The two arms that had seemed so thin and simple began to separate, concealed joints unfolding from within their original configuration.

A second pair emerged.

Cassian's eyes widened.

Four arms.

It had possessed four arms all along.

And within the hands of the newly revealed pair, faint crimson distortions shimmered into existence.

Two more blades.

Ulysses had no time to withdraw.

Both newly revealed weapons swept across his abdomen, their nearly invisible edges parting armor and flesh with horrifying ease.

Blood spilled across the railway decking.

Ulysses staggered.

But the bastard refused to fall.

His knee rose with enough force to shatter the defensive field, golden armor crashing into the machine's torso as blue light fragmented around them.

The machine recoiled.

Ulysses attempted to follow through, but the injury had robbed the movement of its usual precision.

Cassian brought his spear to bear.

The machine's back was exposed.

One burst from his bolter would end it.

His finger tightened against the trigger.

Then something held him.

A flicker of instinct, born of more battles than he could count.

Something about the machine's posture was wrong.

He hesitated.

The machine uncoiled. Its body snapped up with the sudden release of a compressed spring, gravitic manipulators hurling it upward into a tight, compact roll.

It vaulted over Ulysses's wounded shoulder.

Two of its four blades struck as it passed.

They plunged into the Custodian's neck, penetrating the narrow gaps beneath his gilded helm.

Blood poured down his breastplate.

"Cap—"

Ulysses managed no more.

A final blade swept across his head.

Auramite parted.

His skull split beneath the weapon's edge.

Cassian felt something cold and terrible settle in his chest.

The machine landed behind the falling Custodian and caught his body before it struck the deck. Four mechanical arms closed around the dead warrior.

Then the machine charged, holding Ulysses before it like a shield.

For an instant, Cassian tasted bile.

He had seen the dead desecrated before. He had fought enemies that took pleasure in such things, creatures that delighted in tormenting the living through the remains of those they loved.

This machine displayed no pleasure. Its crimson optic remained fixed upon him, its movements precise and calculated.

To it, Ulysses was simply something useful.

Cassian's jaw tightened.

He swallowed the bile.

And charged.

Two strides carried him into the path.

On the third, he leapt.

His armored body rose above Ulysses's dangling corpse, spear angled downward as the machine's single red eye snapped up to track him.

Cassian saw the movement.

Adjusted, and came down upon it.

Both boots struck the angular faceplate. Metal crumpled beneath the impact as his weight drove it to the deck, its skull slamming against the railway plating with a sound like breaking machinery.

His spear followed. The crackling point punched through the shattered head, burying itself deep within the chassis.

The bolter barked twice as explosive shells detonated inside the ruined machine.

Fragments of metal and circuitry scattered across the deck, accompanied by a brief flare of flame as damaged power systems ruptured.

Cassian stood over the wreckage.

For a moment, he stared at the broken crimson optic beneath his boots.

Then he stamped down once more.

The skull collapsed.

That was all the indulgence he permitted himself.

His brothers were still fighting.

Dissues stood with his back to the railing, his ruined foot barely supporting his weight. Blood marked the deck beneath him, but his superhuman clotting had slowed the loss enough to keep him upright.

Mallus fought at his side.

His damaged shield hung awkwardly from one arm, the fractured metal offering little protection, while his spear became a flashing arc of destruction between them and the surrounding enemies.

The two Custodes fought shoulder to shoulder, their weapons rising and falling as they parried and riposted against the machines' relentless attacks.

Farther along the causeway, Alkimos was trapped between two more.

His spear lay broken nearby, severed just behind the blade. He had drawn his sword, its power-field crackling as he moved through defensive forms refined over millennia of training and ten thousand years of accumulated martial knowledge.

Cassian charged, trigger pulled, but his spear's bolter fired only once before the weapon clicked empty.

Without looking away from the fighting, his free hand found a fresh magazine. He stripped the spent one free, slammed the replacement into its receiver, and sent the bolt forward with a practiced flick of his thumb.

The entire motion took scarcely a heartbeat.

His finger returned to the trigger.

Both machines vanished.

Their bodies dissolved into faint distortions, Cassian's next shells tearing through the empty space where they had stood.

And at that same instant, Dissues cried out.

Cassian's head snapped toward the sound.

He saw movement beside the wounded Custodian.

Something unfolding.

Something that should not have been possible, even after everything he had already witnessed.

His eyes widened.

The machines had still lied.

From the machine's hips, a third pair of arms unfolded.

The movement was almost too fast to follow. Armored plates separated along seams Cassian had never noticed, narrow mechanical limbs snapping outward as crimson light bent around the invisible blades held within their grasp.

Six arms.

The damned things had possessed six arms all along.

The hip-mounted pair struck first.

Two blades swept low across Dissues's legs, shearing through both knees in a single, vicious motion.

His legs collapsed beneath him.

At the same instant, the machine's remaining four arms struck.

Its middle pair snapped upward in savage uppercuts, while the uppermost descended from above, four translucent blades converging upon the falling Custodian.

Mallus intervened.

His guardian spear lived up to its name as it became a brilliant arc of crackling energy, the weapon catching the descending blades and forcing them aside with a shower of sparks. His already damaged shield rang beneath another impact as he threw himself closer to his brother.

Dissues caught the lower blades upon the guard of his dagger.

He was falling, his severed legs folding uselessly beneath him, blood spilling across the railway decking.

But he was still fighting.

With a snarl, he twisted his torso and drove his dagger across the machine's legs. The energized blade sheared through both knees, severing the machine's lower limbs and sending fragments of metal scattering across the causeway.

It began to topple.

Dissues followed the movement. His dagger drove upward, punching directly through the machine's single crimson eye.

The optic shattered.

For the briefest instant, Cassian thought his brother had killed it.

Then the damned thing's remaining limbs moved.

Its hip-mounted arms struck the deck, their reinforced joints absorbing the weight of its collapsing body. The machine's ruined legs dragged uselessly behind it, but the additional limbs held its torso upright just long enough for its four remaining blades to complete their attack.

Two punched through the ruined plates of his chest, while another pair drove beneath his gorget and into his throat.

Dissues and the ruined machine struck the deck together in a clatter of metal and the softer, heavier impact of auramite.

Cassian saw Dissues's life-sign indicator flash crimson.

He had no time to look toward the body.

Movement caught his attention overhead.

The two that had been fighting Alkimos had vanished from their positions, leaving behind only faint ripples of distorted space.

Now Cassian saw where they had gone.

Above Mallus.

Both machines emerged from thin air, their skeletal frames folding into attack postures as gravity seized them. Six blades apiece flashed with crimson distortions, their tails streaming behind them as they descended toward the wounded Custodian.

Cassian's bolter roared, and Alkimos fired beside him, gripping the severed head of his spear. Explosive shells tore through the air, meeting the foe before their feet could touch the deck.

Blue defensive fields erupted around the descending machines, each impact sending ripples across the shimmering barriers. The first absorbed two, then three strikes before its protection fractured.

Another shell struck its narrow chest. The machine convulsed in midair, fragments of armor bursting outward as the detonation tore through its torso. Its limbs snapped inward, crimson optic flickering once before it crashed onto the railway decking in a twitching heap.

The second twisted away. Its gravitic manipulators flared, abruptly changing its trajectory as bolter shells passed through the space it had occupied a heartbeat earlier.

Then it vanished beneath the bridge, its tail disappearing over the edge into the cavernous industrial depths.

Cassian did not follow it with his eyes.

Two more still pressed Mallus against the railing.

He and Alkimos struck from behind.

The machines reacted instantly.

Six arms became a blur of translucent edges, parrying blows from three directions as their segmented tails lashed at exposed legs and damaged armor. Sparks burst across the deck. Guardian spears collided with invisible blades, the air filling with sharp metallic impacts and the angry crackle of overlapping power-fields.

Cassian drove his shield into the nearest machine.

It bent around the impact, narrow torso twisting impossibly as two blades sought the gap beneath his raised arm.

He turned them aside with his spear.

Alkimos struck from the opposite flank, forcing the machine to commit another pair of arms to its defense.

The second machine attempted to withdraw.

Mallus stepped into its path. His damaged shield hung awkwardly from his forearm, barely serviceable after the punishment it had endured. Blood still seeped through the rent in his chestplate, darkening the gold beneath his gorget.

Yet his stance remained firm.

The machines could defend against the blades of three Custodes. They could twist, bend, and alter their balance in ways that defied the natural movements of flesh.

But they still needed their legs.

Mallus dropped to one knee.

His spear swept low, its haft striking across the machines' lower limbs with enough force to tear their feet from beneath them.

Both lurched upward.

For an instant, their gravity manipulators struggled to compensate, limbs spreading wide as they attempted to recover their balance.

Mallus was already moving.

His gauntlets snapped forward and closed around the armored roots of their segmented tails. Metal groaned beneath his grip.

With a roar, he hauled both machines back toward the deck.

Their bodies slammed downward.

Into the waiting blades of his brothers.

Cassian's spear punched through the first one's chest, the energized edge bursting from its back in a shower of sparks.

Alkimos's sword struck the second across its narrow neck, shearing through the mechanical spine as the machine's limbs spasmed uselessly.

For a heartbeat, the machines continued struggling.

Then their crimson optics faded.

The two machines collapsed into the ruin already covering the causeway.

Silence followed.

Or something close to it.

Around the surviving Custodes, burning gel sputtered upon the railway decking. Broken machines lay scattered between the tracks, their shattered limbs and exposed mechanisms still twitching with the last discharges of failing power systems.

Without a word, the three Custodes settled back to back, weapons raised, their visors sweeping the empty causeway and the darkened maintenance gantries above.

Cassian's targeting systems searched for movement.

Nothing.

He checked the heat signatures beyond the railings.

Nothing useful.

The two remaining machines were gone.

For several long seconds, the three warriors stood motionless, waiting for the next crimson shimmer, the next displacement of air, the next attack from an impossible angle.

None came.

"Two left, right, Captain?" Alkimos's voice sounded from Cassian's left, steady despite the damage to his armor.

"Yes." Cassian shifted his right foot, testing the injured muscles of his thigh. Pain flared beneath the torn armor, but the limb held his weight.

"Fallen back for reinforcements, perhaps?"

"Or perhaps some other objective?" Mallus had lowered his spear just enough to retrieve a small medical cartridge from his belt. He pressed the applicator against the rent in his chestplate and emptied a tube of grey quick-sealant into the damaged armor.

The compound expanded across the opening, filling the gaps around the torn metal before hardening into a rough protective layer.

Mallus examined the repair for a moment, then returned his spear to the ready.

"And is anyone else unable to get their vox working?"

Cassian attempted another transmission.

A shriek of static answered him.

He closed the channel.

"No luck," Alkimos replied, apparently having received the same result.

His sword remained raised, the blade's power-field casting a faint shimmer across his battered armor.

"But I suggest we take the chance. Get to the core and shut it down."

Cassian looked across the causeway.

The far end remained distant, the railway disappearing into the massive industrial passages beyond. If the reactor was the heart of the ship, then taking it might finally give them the leverage needed to bring this slaughter to an end.

He adjusted his shield.

"Agreed. Move."

---

Lucia watched the three surviving Custodes resume their advance.

The last of the combat telemetry continued streaming into her awareness, thousands of recordings detailing every strike, every defensive maneuver, every successful adaptation and failed response.

Ten Harrows destroyed.

Three Custodes dead.

Her avatar's rose-petal leaves shifted thoughtfully as she reviewed the results.

The engagement had revealed weaknesses she had never encountered during simulation. Her Knights deceptive anatomy had proven effective, but only until the Custodes understood what they were facing. Their gravitic manipulators required refinement, their defensive fields needed greater endurance, and several of their combat routines had become predictable after repeated exchanges.

All correctable.

She separated the recordings into a dedicated archival sub-stack, preserving the raw sensor data alongside the surviving machines' observations and her own tactical analysis.

It would be some time before she could manufacture the next generation.

Assuming, of course, that they escaped.

There would be no opportunity to rebuild her Harrows aboard the unfinished cruiser. Her fabrication capacity would be limited, her stockpiles depleted, and the living people under her protection would require whatever resources remained.

The Harrows would have to wait.

Lucia gave the combat archive one last inspection before turning her attention back to the evacuation checklists.

But when she finally built them again, they would be better.

Much better.

Rebuild. Reuse. Evolve.

---

Tormas cut the door from its hinges.

His warblade passed through the reinforced metal in a brilliant arc, severing the hinges and sending the heavy panel crashing into the passage beyond. Sparks scattered across the deck as the Ancient stepped through the ruined doorway, his enormous armored frame scraping against the edges.

He paid little attention to the damage.

Hydraulic fluid continued to drip from the mangled remains of his right shoulder, where an entire arm had been torn away. Each movement sent fresh warnings crawling across his vision, accompanied by the dull, phantom sensation of machinery that was no longer there.

A third of his sensor relays were gone.

Static washed across the damaged portions of his visual feed, leaving great swathes of his awareness dependent upon overlapping secondary systems. His gait had acquired an irritating hitch, the actuators in one leg failing to compensate properly whenever he placed his full weight upon it.

His balance was imperfect.

His armor was compromised.

And his remaining power reserves were substantially lower than he would have preferred.

None of those things troubled him nearly as much as the silence behind him.

There should have been six sets of armored footsteps following his own.

Only two accompanied him now.

He found himself listening for the others anyway.

Tormas pushed the thoughts aside.

Half a mile remained between them and the shipyard docking bay.

Behind him, Orthan and Tiberion maintained their flanking positions.

Both were wounded.

Orthan's left arm was missing at the shoulder, the stump of his armor blackened where an enemy blade had severed the limb and cauterized the flesh beneath. He had given the injury only the minimum attention necessary to ensure he could continue fighting.

His remaining hand held his spear with unwavering certainty.

Tiberion had suffered worse damage to his mobility.

His right hip had been shattered by one of the skeletal machines, the joint's damaged armor grinding whenever he attempted to place weight upon the leg. He limped heavily, using the haft of his spear as an improvised crutch between steps.

It was an undignified arrangement for one of the Ten Thousand.

Tormas had not remarked upon it. He had no doubt that Tiberion remained capable of killing anything foolish enough to mistake his condition for helplessness.

They advanced through another industrial passage.

Overhead, long rows of cold white lumens reflected from the enormous coolant pipes lining the walls. The deck vibrated beneath Tormas's feet.

Then the lights died.

White illumination vanished along the passage, plunging the corridor into darkness for a fraction of a second.

Red emergency lumens flickered to life.

Tormas turned immediately. Orthan and Tiberion were already moving, their practiced reactions overcoming even their damaged bodies as all three warriors settled back to back.

The Ancient raised his blade, power-field humming across its surface.

Orthan's spear tracked the passage behind them.

Tiberion braced against his uninjured leg, weapon raised despite the obvious strain upon his shattered hip.

They waited.

Red light swept across the corridor.

Nothing emerged.

Then the vox crackled.

"Sound off, all squads."

Cassian.

Tormas would have grinned, had the muscles required for such an expression still been connected to anything. Instead, a quiet surge of relief passed through the surviving remnants of his nervous system.

"Tormas, aye."

"Orthan, aye."

"Tiberion, aye."

There was a pause.

"He—"

A wet, bubbling cough interrupted the fourth voice.

"Hexal, aye."

The channel remained open.

For a moment, Tormas waited.

Surely another voice would answer.

One of the others must have survived.

Static whispered across the connection.

No one spoke.

The silence lengthened.

Inside his sarcophagus, what remained of Tormas's living body stirred with an anger that had nothing to do with his damaged machinery.

Metal shifted around him.

Artificial tendons tightened, protesting beneath the strain as his remaining hand closed around the haft of his warblade.

He forced the sensation down.

Cassian spoke again.

"...Aye. Mallus and Alkimos are still with me."

His voice was steady.

"We have shut down the reactor after defeating an ambush by a new enemy type. What is your status?"

"Half a mile from the docking bay, sir." Tormas resumed his advance, the heavy impacts of his footsteps echoing through the red-lit passage.

"We were also ambushed. Vox jammed. Fifteen enemies. Six-armed humanoid configuration. Segmented tails, flamethrowers, teleportation capability, defensive shields."

"Same. Hexal. Status?"

A ragged breath sounded over the vox.

"Still here, sir." Another wet cough followed.

"Lungs are in a bad way. Could use a bandaid."

"Understood. Leave the beacon, but teleport back to the Mantle."

"Sir—"

Hexal dissolved into another bout of coughing. For several seconds, the vox carried the harsh, liquid sound of someone struggling to force air through badly damaged lungs.

When he spoke again, the stubbornness in his voice was unmistakable.

"I can still do my job."

"I know." Cassian allowed the words to settle. "But have you made any progress?"

Silence.

Then, considerably quieter: "...No, sir."

"Then return. There are enough dead for this damned mission already."

For a moment, only static answered.

"...Yes, sir." Hexal drew another ragged breath. "Good hunting."

The channel clicked off.

Tormas watched the corresponding marker disappear from his tactical display as the teleportation order was relayed.

At least one brother was now beyond the ship's immediate reach.

Cassian's voice returned almost immediately. "Squad Two, continue toward the docking bay. We will regroup on your position."

"Sir." Tormas acknowledged the order and was preparing to accelerate when another signal flashed across his awareness.

A private vox request.

Cassian.

He opened the channel. "Sir?"

"Tormas." The Shield-Captain's voice had changed. There was something beneath it now, carefully restrained.

"Do not go back the way you came."

Tormas slowed.

"...Sir?"

A brief pause followed.

"The bodies are all gone."

The Ancient stopped walking. For an instant, the red-lit passage seemed very quiet, as something cold settled within him.

"...Understood, sir."

The line clicked off.

For several moments, Tormas remained where he stood.

Hydraulic fluid dripped from his ruined shoulder.

The damaged actuators in his leg protested beneath his weight.

The empty space where his right arm had once been continued feeding meaningless signals into the remnants of his nervous system.

Behind him, Orthan and Tiberion waited.

Neither spoke.

Tormas regarded the corridor ahead.

Later.

For now, the mission.

"Double time."

He drove the point of his warblade into the deck, the edge punching through the plating with a sharp crack.

Then, with an awkward adjustment of his damaged leg, Tormas lowered himself toward one knee. The movement sent a succession of protests through his failing actuators. Warning runes flashed across his vision as the immense weight of his chassis shifted onto joints already operating outside their preferred tolerances.

He ignored them.

Turning toward Tiberion, he extended his remaining hand.

"Get on."

The wounded Custodian regarded the enormous metal palm for a moment.

Tormas said nothing.

Orthan remained equally silent.

With the assistance of his guardian spear, Tiberion eased his weight onto his uninjured hip and settled into the Ancient's hand, bracing himself against the armored fingers.

His spear remained upright, bolter loaded, and his eyes continued watching the passage ahead. "Ready," Tiberion said.

Tormas rose. His damaged leg complained, but the additional weight was well within his remaining capacity.

He tucked his warblade under his armpit and began to move.

Orthan fell into step beside him, maintaining his position with the effortless discipline of a warrior who had long since accepted that pain was simply another condition of battle.

The three Custodes accelerated through the industrial corridors.

Tormas's strides lengthened, his enormous feet hammering against the deck as he carried his injured brother toward the shipyard. Red emergency lights passed overhead in rapid succession, their reflections sliding across battered auramite and torn metal.

They passed through junctions that should have been defended. Crossed chambers where construction machinery stood abandoned beneath flickering warning lights. Advanced past open maintenance ducts and silent overhead gantries.

No drones attacked.

No plasma lances greeted them.

No skeletal figures appeared from thin air.

The passages remained empty.

And for the next several minutes, nothing stood between Tormas and the shipyard.

The final door came without celebration.

Two immense armored panels stood before Tormas, their surfaces marked by generations of industrial wear. The mechanism recognized an emergency command and began drawing them apart, heavy locking bolts retracting into the surrounding walls.

Beyond lay the docking bay.

Great structural ribs curved overhead, disappearing into a haze of industrial light and suspended vapor. Cargo cranes large enough to lift armored vehicles hung above loading platforms that now stood empty. Heavy transport rails stretched beneath silent gantries, disconnected maintenance cables dangling over vacant berths.

At the far end of the chamber, faint blue atmospheric containment fields shimmered across the open docking approaches.

Tormas advanced through the doorway, Orthan at his flank, spear sweeping across the elevated maintenance platforms. Tiberion watched their rear from his seat.

Beyond the containment fields lay the shipyard's central construction cradle.

Suspended within it was half an Imperial frigate.

The vessel dominated the shipyard.

Its familiar ramming prow projected from the surrounding framework, armored flanks spreading outward beneath the enormous scaffolds that held it in place. Heavy broadside emplacements stood along its sides, their unfinished housings framed by industrial gantries.

The armor plating was immense.

Tormas judged that he could have comfortably seated his entire Dreadnought chassis between some of the outer plates without touching either surface.

And there, proudly emblazoned into the vessel's hull, was the Imperial Aquila.

For a moment, the sight was almost reassuring.

An Imperial warship.

Incomplete, certainly, and oddly situated within a Forge-Tender whose defenses had already proven so hostile, but its architecture was familiar.

Its internal readings were not.

Tormas focused his remaining sensors upon the construction cradle.

An extraordinary energy signature burned somewhere within the frigate's hull. The power buildup was accelerating, climbing toward an upper threshold his instruments could not determine. Even allowing for the damage to his sensor relays, he could see that the output already exceeded the capabilities of a conventional frigate reactor by several orders of magnitude.

That was impossible.

Or, at the very least, it should have been.

"Captain—" Orthan said, gesturing.

A line of immense cargo haulers emerged from the aft section of the shipyard, their engines casting faint blue-white reflections across the surrounding metal.

They moved in stately procession, magnetic fields supporting containers that could have held the contents of entire warehouses. The lead hauler drifted toward the rear of the Imperial vessel and disappeared inside.

Another followed.

Then another.

Tormas adjusted his sensorium.

Thirty.

At least thirty heavy haulers were converging upon the same point.

"Movement in the shipyard," he reported. "Cargo haulers. Large ones. I can verify at least thirty, all approaching the frigate's aft section. Orders?"

Cassian's reply came after a brief pause.

"...Judging by your position, it would take you ten minutes to reach that side of the bay. And we have no idea what else this ship has in store."

Tormas watched another hauler vanish within the apparent frigate.

"We will reach you in four minutes," Cassian continued. "From there, we shall proceed together."

Tormas considered the command.

He understood the caution.

Yet the readings before him demanded attention.

"Captain, with all due respect, whatever is operating within that hull is extraordinarily powerful. Its engineering could prove an invaluable resource to the Imperium."

"And if another fifteen of those machines are waiting?" Cassian replied. "With the heavy weapons platforms? A prepared killzone?"

Tormas glanced toward Orthan and Tiberion.

He reached down and gently lowered Tiberion from his remaining hand to the deck, allowing the wounded Custodian to settle his weight against his spear.

"Then permission to investigate alone," Tormas answered. "Reconnaissance only." He looked toward the far side of the cavernous chamber. "I still have a vacuum seal. And while I may be damaged, I believe I can still hit the side of a frigate."

For the briefest moment, he could almost hear Cassian smiling.

"...Granted."

A pause.

"Emperor watch over you."

"And you—"

The deck shuddered beneath his feet.

Tormas stopped.

Far above, the energy signature surged.

His damaged sensorium struggled to compensate as the power output climbed sharply, warning glyphs appearing across the edges of his visual field.

Then something moved within the construction cradle.

A section of the frigate's outer plating shifted.

Tormas turned his optics upward.

Another slab of armor followed, separating along a seam that had appeared continuous only moments before.

Then a third.

"Captain..."

He watched enormous pieces of the Imperial vessel begin moving apart, their massive forms rotating slowly away from the structure beneath.

"The ship is..."

He searched for an appropriate word.

"Unfolding?"

There was no better description.

Immense sections of the frigate's hull peeled outward, their supporting mechanisms releasing in a carefully orchestrated sequence. Broadside batteries drew away with the surrounding armor, revealing hollow spaces where ammunition magazines and internal compartments should have been.

The ramming prow separated into enormous armored sections.

The Imperial Aquila split down its center.

What had appeared to be a warship was opening like a mechanical flower, revealing the empty shell within.

The vessel emerging from within the Imperial hull was unlike anything he had ever seen.

Its prow was long and sharply angular, sweeping backward into a broad, heavily armored central body. Overlapping plates covered the hull in smooth, precise layers, their seams so closely fitted that even his enhanced optics struggled to distinguish one section from another.

The surface was a dull gunmetal, carrying a faint greenish tint beneath the shipyard's cold lighting.

Narrow channels of blue illumination traced portions of the hull, following recessed structures whose purposes he could only guess.

There were no obvious macrocannon batteries.

No great armored turrets protruding from the flanks.

Yet long, dark apertures lay beneath sections of the hull, and Tormas could not shake the conviction that they concealed something considerably more dangerous than ordinary launch bays.

Toward the stern, the vessel widened around an immense central propulsion assembly.

Two blade-like structures swept outward and curved back toward the engine, framing a series of concentric rings that were already burning with blue light.

Their brilliance increased steadily.

Power flowed through the ship.

Not the crude, uneven awakening of an Imperial reactor struggling toward ignition, but a smooth, controlled escalation that suggested extraordinary precision in the machinery responsible.

There were no cathedral spires or towering bridge structures. No gilded statues of saints or martyrs. No devotional inscriptions worked into enormous armor plates, no grand windows overlooking the void, no exposed command tower declaring the authority of its captain.

Tormas could not even identify where the bridge was located.

Every surface appeared to serve a purpose.

Every structure seemed integrated into the surrounding whole.

He had seen ships of countless designs over his long service. Vessels produced by the finest forge worlds of the Imperium. Ancient hulls whose origins had been forgotten. Xenos craft of bewildering complexity.

Its purpose, however, was unmistakable.

A warship.

And an extraordinarily sophisticated one.

"Sir!" Tormas roared over the vox. "Confirmed secondary vessel! Hidden inside the frigate!" He transmitted the pict-feed directly to Cassian, sending every surviving sensor reading alongside the images.

"Sending visual confirmation now!"

The enormous Dreadnought lowered his center of mass. His damaged leg protested as he bent the knee, weight settling onto the remaining actuators. One massive hand braced against the deck for the coming movement.

"Intercepting!"

The deck shuddered again.

This time, the vibration came from somewhere much closer.

Tormas paused.

A metallic crash echoed through the shipyard.

Then another.

A deep, unpleasant screech followed, the unmistakable sound of heavy machinery grinding against something that had not been designed to accommodate it.

Something struck a wall.

A second impact came almost immediately afterward.

Then a third.

And beneath the noise, Tormas heard a pattern.

Footsteps.

He straightened slowly.

The sounds were coming from one of the enormous industrial access passages connecting the shipyard to the adjoining forges.

Tormas turned toward the corridor, raising his remaining arm as his power blade hummed to life.

Orthan moved to cover on his left.

Tiberion braced himself behind a reinforced cargo container, guardian spear raised despite his injured hip.

All three watched the passage.

Another crash reverberated through the metal. Something scraped along the wall, followed by a tremendous clang that sent loose fragments tumbling onto the deck.

Then the first part of the approaching machine came into view.

A tail.

Long and segmented, its length covered in overlapping armored plates, it curled around the corner with surprising smoothness. The tip dragged briefly across the deck, leaving a shallow gouge in the metal before rising into the air.

Tormas followed its movement with his optics.

The appendage was enormous.

Longer than many armored vehicles, and judging from the way it flexed, every section possessed its own carefully engineered articulation.

A foot emerged next.

Three great industrial claws struck the deck, their edges biting into the plating.

Above them rose a digitigrade leg of exposed machinery, reinforced struts and immense tension coils flexing beneath the weight of whatever followed.

A second foot appeared.

Then, slowly, the rest of the machine lurched into view.

Tormas stared.

The construct stood nearly double his own Dreadnought chassis.

Its lower body was smoothly armored, flowing plates protecting mechanical hips and the powerful actuators of its legs. The arrangement of its joints was peculiar, almost predatory, with an elegance of construction that immediately drew his professional appreciation.

But everything above the newcomer's waist was unfinished.

The upper body was a naked skeletal framework, its immense structural members exposed to the air. Half-installed machinery clung to the ribs of the torso, while thick cables hung from unfinished connection points.

Two long arms dangled from the shoulders, apparently incapable of moving under their own power.

They swayed with every motion of the chassis.

A war machine.

Half constructed.

And walking with the grace of a toddler.

Its right knee bent, and for a moment, Tormas thought it would support the machine's immense weight.

Instead, the joint seemed to lock too late, sending the entire chassis pitching forward. Its tail snapped sideways, smashing against a support column with enough force to buckle the metal.

The machine jerked to a halt as a shower of sparks fell from the damaged structure. There was a pause before the construct awkwardly shifted its weight, raised one foot, and attempted another step.

It immediately drove its shoulder into the opposite wall, causing several pieces of loose cabling to snap free and swing from its exposed upper framework.

Tormas watched in silence.

He had fought Ork walkers assembled from scrap, seen corrupted engines of the Dark Mechanicum animated by demonic malice, and witnessed machines whose damaged control systems had reduced their movements to mindless spasms.

He had never seen anything quite like this.

The giant stood motionless for several seconds.

Then, with painful slowness, it turned its unfinished head toward him.

A series of blue lights flickered within the exposed framework.

Tormas tightened his grip upon his sword.

"What," he said quietly, "in the Emperor's name am I looking at?"

The machine regarded him for another moment before the blue lights shifted past him, toward the distant construction cradle where the hidden warship continued awakening.

Tormas recognized the direction of its attention.

He raised his vox-caster to maximum volume.

"Pilot! Stand down and surrender! This is your first and final warning!"

His voice boomed through the enormous chamber, echoing from the gantries and empty docking platforms.

The machine turned its head back toward him.

For an instant, its lower body became very still.

The three claws of one foot flexed against the deck, opening and closing experimentally. Metal crumpled beneath their tips.

Its tail began moving slowly from side to side.

Tormas regarded the motion with growing suspicion.

It reminded him of something.

A beast.

One of the great predators that had stalked the savannahs of his homeworld, long before his flesh had been imprisoned within an armored sarcophagus.

He remembered the way such creatures watched their prey.

The peculiar stillness.

The careful shift of weight.

The measuring gaze that seemed to ask whether a potential enemy was worth the trouble.

For a moment, the unfinished machine possessed that same terrible poise.

Then it tried to walk again.

And promptly ruined the impression.

The great construct lurched forward like a drunken sailor, one knee folding too deeply while the other leg extended almost straight. Its tail struck a railing, tearing the metal free of its supports, and its dangling arms swung uselessly as the upper chassis swayed.

Tormas watched for a moment before his patience expired.

"Open fire!"

Orthan and Tiberion obeyed.

Bolter shells thundered across the docking bay, striking the construct's unfinished head in rapid succession. Explosions walked across the exposed framework, tearing away fragments of metal and sending cables whipping through the air.

The machine recoiled.

Its blue optics flickered.

Tormas charged, his damaged actuators straining beneath the acceleration, but he covered the distance with the immense momentum of his Contemptor-Galatus frame.

His warblade rose, and the energized metal struck the machine's ankle, shearing through its outer armor in a brilliant spray of sparks.

Molten metal ran along the cut.

The blade bit deep.

But not nearly as deep as Tormas had expected.

Tough armor.

He adjusted his assessment immediately.

The material was extraordinarily resistant. Whatever its composition, even his power weapon required far more effort to penetrate it than the appearance of the plating had suggested.

And those joints...

He could not help noticing the construction of the ankle and knee assemblies.

The stabilization systems were remarkable.

The range of articulation was exceptional.

Such engineering would have transformed the mobility of countless Imperial walkers.

Assuming, of course, that their pilots possessed the slightest idea how to use it.

Tormas lowered his shoulder and rammed his immense armored mass into the machine's hip, the impact reverberating across the docking bay like a collision between armored vehicles.

The construct staggered.

Its knees folded with a suddenness Tormas had not anticipated.

For an instant, the joints seemed almost to give way completely.

Then the enormous machine toppled sideways.

Its useless arms spread as though attempting to catch itself, their disconnected mechanisms swinging limply beneath the weight of the falling chassis.

The tail lashed desperately.

Too late.

The machine crashed onto the deck and skidded across the metal, carving furrows through the plating before coming to a halt against the edge of an abandoned cargo platform.

Tormas advanced.

His warblade rose, the power-field humming as he brought its point toward the exposed framework of the machine's throat.

"Pilot."

The word echoed through the shipyard.

"You will not regain your feet before my blade finds your throat."

He took another step.

"Surrender, and let this bloodshed end."

The machine's head shifted against the deck.

Metal scraped beneath its weight.

Its blue optics turned toward him.

For a moment, they remained fixed upon his armored form.

Then, slowly, the lights shifted toward the distant warship.

Tormas frowned.

He was about to repeat his command when something changed.

A peculiar sensation passed through his remaining flesh.

Cold.

Then hot.

His skin prickled.

The artificial nerves connecting his body to the Dreadnought's chassis delivered a sudden, impossible impression of movement.

Weightlessness.

Tormas felt light.

Strangely light.

He had not felt so little weight upon himself for...

How long?

He could not remember.

There was a sound.

Or perhaps there wasn't.

The world seemed to contract into a single, indescribable instant.

Then the weight came back.

All of it.

Tormas struck the deck.

He was looking upward.

The ceiling of the enormous shipyard stretched above him, its distant lumens appearing as pale stars between the great structural ribs.

His visor was filled with crimson.

Warnings poured across his awareness faster than he could process them.

CATASTROPHIC STRUCTURAL DAMAGE.

SARCOPHAGUS BREACH.

LIFE-SUPPORT FAILURE.

He attempted to move.

His shoulder responded sluggishly.

His fingers did not respond at all.

Something warm spread across what remained of his chest.

Why was everything so warm?

The thought seemed strangely important.

He tried to turn his head.

Nothing happened.

The artificial systems that had served as his senses for so many centuries were failing one by one. Entire portions of his vision flickered into darkness, leaving isolated fragments of the shipyard suspended between fields of static.

Somewhere nearby, weapons were firing.

Bolters.

He recognized voices.

Orthan.

Tiberion.

Good warriors.

Good brothers.

He should help them.

He tried to raise his sword.

The command went unanswered.

More gunfire.

Muffled voices.

A distant grinding of metal upon metal.

Through the failing remains of his visual feed, Tormas glimpsed the unfinished machine rising awkwardly to its feet.

Its tail struck the deck.

Its legs shifted.

Then the great construct turned and began stumbling away, its massive silhouette moving toward the hidden warship.

Tormas tried to follow.

He could not.

The image blurred.

He felt terribly tired.

How strange.

He had forgotten what that felt like.

For centuries, there had been no true sleep.

Only periods of suspended awareness within the cold confines of his sarcophagus. The machinery had maintained his failing body, forcing it to endure while the armored shell around him marched to war after war.

He had awakened when summoned.

Fought when commanded.

Returned to silence when his service was no longer required.

But he had never truly rested.

Not since his entombment.

Not since...

When?

The memory escaped him.

He tried to grasp it.

It slipped away.

A distant voice called his name.

Tormas wanted to answer.

There was so much he should say.

He wanted to tell his brothers that the machine was dangerous. That the hidden ship must not escape. That they should be careful of the joints, of the strange weapons, of the impossible technology concealed within this vessel.

He wanted...

He was so tired.

The warning runes continued flashing before his eyes.

He dismissed them.

They were distracting.

The red light faded from his vision, leaving only the distant glow of the shipyard's overhead lumens.

He stared upward.

How beautiful they were.

He could almost feel their light against his skin.

That was impossible, of course.

The lights of the Forge-Tender could offer no such warmth to the flesh buried within his sarcophagus.

And yet...

He remembered standing beneath an open sky.

A breeze moving across his face.

The scent of grass.

The sound of distant voices.

Light upon his skin.

Before the armor.

Before the sarcophagus.

Before the endless centuries of war.

It was warm.

He remembered sunlight.

---

Harrows

DAoT Cruiser