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.