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  ‘I am Lorgar,’ he told the crawling god. ‘The seventeenth son of the Emperor of Man.’

  The god bared black teeth and grey gums, seeking to shout. Nothing but ash left its snarling lips, spilling onto the sand beneath its chin, while the psychic aftershock of the denied scream battered uselessly against Lorgar’s guarded mind.

  It crawled closer. Two of its fingers broke against the ground. Congealing magma oozed from the stumps, blackening as it dried.

  ‘I know you can hear me,’ the primarch kept his voice calm. His crozius hammer flared with energy, lightning sparking in a mad dance over its spiked head. ‘But you cannot answer, can you?’

  He took another step backwards. In response, the god’s statue gave another soundless roar.

  ‘I see you cannot.’ The primarch’s smile faltered. ‘Nothing is left to you but this dull ache of unquenchable hatred. That is almost tragic.’

  Lorgar.

  Ingethel? He reached for the daemon’s voice. Ingethel? I have found… something. An echo. A wraith. I believe I will put it out of its misery.

  It is an Avatar of Kaela Mensha Khaine.

  Lorgar nearly shrugged. The name means nothing to me.

  The war god of the soulbroken. You have disturbed the city’s heart, bringing living warmth to the coldest of places.

  He returned the psychic equivalent of a snort. Whatever it once was, it is dying now. It has been dying for a long time, entombed beneath this poisonous soil.

  As you say. A pause. A sense of amusement. Lorgar. Behind you.

  The primarch turned from the crawling god, to face the slender figures walking from the gritty wind. He could see nothing in the way of detail; they were silhouettes in the storm, drifting closer, curved blades in their hands.

  A dozen, two dozen, all ghosting closer. Not a single one of them betrayed the warm resonance of living sentience.

  ‘Mon-keigh,’ whispered the wind. ‘Sha’eil, Sha’eil, Sha’eil.’

  He knew the word. Sha’eil. Hell. A place of absolute evil.

  Lorgar blasted each of the silhouettes apart with focused projections of psychic force. It took no more than a moment’s focus. Heat haze shimmered in the wake of their discorporation – the primarch laughed as he realised he was wasting his strength on mirages.

  A groaning, grinding moan rang out from behind. Lorgar turned again, in time to see the god’s statue finally rising to its knees. From the red sand, it drew forth an ancient and cracked blade. Through clenched teeth that wheezed with ash, it coughed its first words.

  ‘Suin Daellae,’ growled the withered god. The blade in its hands, used more as a crutch than a weapon, streamed with unhealthy black smoke, but didn’t burst into flame.

  Lorgar watched the trembling creature with a cautious eye. Suin Daellae, he sent to his distant guide. I am not familiar with the words.

  The Doom that Wails. It is the name of the blade in its hands.

  Lorgar watched the Avatar topple again, crashing onto its hands and knees. I almost feel pity for the thing.

  He was aware of the daemon taking form behind him, shaping itself from the wind, but felt no compunction to turn and face it.

  You should not pity it, Lorgar. There is a lesson in this.

  The primarch was sure there was, but he cared little for such unsubtle teachings. The Avatar’s skin cracked and peeled away by each of the statue’s joints.

  ‘I am ending this,’ he said aloud.

  As you wish, Ingethel’s words drifted back.

  Lorgar stepped forward, his mace heavy in his hands.

  Remember this moment, Lorgar. Remember it for what it is, and what it stands for.

  He drew closer to the collapsing statue and raised his crozius high, every inch the image of an executioner.

  The Avatar’s cracking hand gripped his armour greave. Another of its fingers broke off.

  ‘I will end the misery of your ignorance,’ said Lorgar, and let the hammer fall.

  A SINGLE STRIKE. A blow to the back of the head.

  The crash of iron against stone. The hiss of dust captured by the wind. The rattle of grit against sealed ceramite.

  There is a lesson here.

  On the red soil, an outline of black ash marked the shape of a god’s grave.

  Lorgar. Do you see it?

  Lorgar turned back to the daemon. Ingethel was slavering, its jaws dripping with clear saliva that somehow failed to crystallise in the intense cold.

  Do you see? it asked, unblinking. A divine being can be as ignorant, as lost, as blind as any mere mortal. They can be as stubborn in their defiance, and just as grave a threat to the truth. Look at the revenant you destroyed – an echo of a faith that failed long ago. Now it is gone, this world can heal, untainted by false and heathen belief. Do you see?

  The irritation left his vox-grille as a raucous grunt. ‘You asked that question of my son, Argel Tal, and I do not wish for the same blunt instruction. Yes, Ingethel. I see.’

  Even a god may die, Lorgar.

  He laughed again. ‘Subtlety is poison to you, isn’t it?’

  Even a god may die. You will remember those words, before the end.

  The daemon’s silent tone gave him pause. ‘You speak of the end as if you know its outcome.’

  I have walked the paths of possibility. I have seen what might be, and what is almost certain to be. But one cannot see what will be, until it has become what was.

  Lorgar no longer felt like laughing. ‘What is most likely, then? How will this end?’

  The daemon licked its maw clean of dark ash and red dust. It ends as it began, Emperor’s son. It ends in war.

  TWO WORDS WERE all it took.

  ‘Show me.’

  PART THREE

  IN WAR

  SIX

  THE ULTIMATE GATE

  ‘I KNOW THIS place,’ he whispered into the silence. ‘This is the Eternity Gate.’

  Lorgar stared down the endless hall – wide enough to admit a thousand men marching abreast, long enough to house every banner of honour from each of the Emperor’s regiments. A hundred thousand banners, just in range of his genhanced eyesight. A million reaching beyond it. Two million. Three.

  More and more and more, as far as the eye could see, proudly heralding world after world clutched in the Imperium’s grip. Each world raised countless regiments, their war flags hanging here to form an infinite tapestry. The hall itself, stretching for hours upon hours, was part cathedral, part museum, part sanctum of honour.

  In the furthest reaches, shadowed by the darkness abounding, stood two wolf-masked Warhound Titans, their city-killing guns trained upon the marble steps leading towards the great gate they guarded.

  The portal itself defied description. Words such as ‘‘door’’ and ‘‘gateway’’ implied comprehensible scope, something mortal minds could fathom without difficulty. This was no such thing. To construct such a barricade must have taken a full quarter of the remaining adamantium deposits on Mars, even before the ornate gold was added in layers upon the outer core of dense ceramite plating.

  A barrier so grand, so impossible in scale and majesty, could only be protecting the secrets of one soul, above all others. Lorgar had been here but rarely, for the Eternity Gate was the portal to his father’s innermost sanctum, where the Emperor kept his personal genetic laboratory sealed away from his sons and servants.

  For a time, Lorgar stood beneath the company banners of an Army regiment hailing from a world called Valhalla. The imagery upon the flags was one of a white world and cloaked men raising pennants in the Emperors service. Lorgar had never set foot upon their world and wondered how far it lay from Terra in the night sky. Perhaps its people were as cold and unwelcoming as the frost upon which they trod.

  ‘Why did you show me this?’ he asked, turning from the hanging banners.

  Ingethel slid from the shadows, the fur around its swollen eye dark and wet with secreted fluids.

  ‘Are you weeping?’ Lorgar asked t
he thing.

  No. I am bleeding.

  ‘Why?’

  The daemon’s uneven jaws clicked together. It does not matter. Tell me, what do you see in this place?

  Lorgar took a breath, tasting the hot and sweat-ripened air of his armour’s internal ventilation. ‘Can I breathe here?’

  Yes. We are no longer on Shanriatha.

  Lorgar disengaged the seals at his collar and lifted the helm clear. Cold air caressed his face, while his next breath pulled a welcome chill into his burning lungs.

  He turned his calm, scholarly eyes upon the daemon. ‘How did we leave the dead world?’

  We are there, and we are here. You will understand one night, Lorgar. For now, explanations are a waste of time and breath. Some truths cannot be contained by the mortal mind.

  The primarch smiled to hide the curl of his lip. ‘For a guide, you are doing precious little guiding.’

  I am an emissary. A viator. Ingethel slithered along the lush red carpet, leaving a slug’s smear. You are here, for all that it matters. You can breathe here, and die here, if we are not careful. The warp is everything and nothing, and you are adrift in its tides.

  ‘Very well.’ That would do, he supposed, for now.

  Do you hear that, Lorgar?

  Lorgar took another refreshing breath, letting the chill fill his chest. ‘Battle, in the distance?’ He shook his head. ‘This vision is a lie. The Imperial Palace has never been besieged.’

  No? You look upon this endless chamber with mortal eyes. Use an immortal’s sight.

  Easier said than done. His sixth sense, never reliable, was a curled core within his mind, suddenly resistant to being unlocked in this place. With concentration, he managed to pry his psychic gift open, as if pulling apart the fingers of a stiffened fist.

  Lorgar managed to say ‘I…’ before he was drowned in the battle raging around him.

  GHOSTS WAGED WAR in every direction, their spectral bodies falling victim to the bite of each other’s bolters and blades.

  The illusion was complete enough to force his body into a physical response – a quickening of the heart, a shallowness of breath, the crucial urge to draw steel and leap into the fray. He considered himself a seeker, a scholar before a soldier, but the battle’s intensity demanded instinctive reaction. Through clenched teeth, Lorgar watched warriors in the clashing shades of Legiones Astartes armour fighting and dying at his feet.

  Amongst their chaotic ranks were beings of twisted inhumanity, their wrenched faces and bleeding bodies serving as ironclad evidence of their Neverborn origins. Claws snapped and cleaved; fleshy tendrils of barbed skin lashed and coiled in strangling embrace; eyeless faces howled above the grating clatter of bolters. Thousands upon thousands of warriors, mortal and immortal alike, grinding and slaying, shrieking and roaring. Many bore wings of flame and smoke; while others soared to the high ceiling on chiropteran pinions, casting bats’ shadows on the fighting below. These last daemons hurled the struggling bodies of captured Imperial Fists down, bombarding the warriors below with their own brothers.

  Lorgar released a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. In a voiceless exhalation, he said the words, ‘Witness before me, the very heart of heresy.’

  Ingethel hunched next to him. A reflection of the tumult showed plain in his swollen eye. Your own words, Emperor’s child?

  ‘No. A quote, from an old Covenant text.’

  Lorgar stared as a towering figure, taller even than a primarch, waded through a broken phalanx of Imperial Fists. The creature was clad in cracked fragments of ceramite armour, warped into a colossal image of Legionary purity. The brutal familiarity of a Mark II snarl-mouthed helm had become a jawed monstrosity, crested by great, curved horns of iron and ivory. Its hands, once human fists in armoured gauntlets, were swollen into gnarled claws ending in scything black barbs, akin to a bird of prey’s talons. Even from this distance, the aberration reeked of something poisonous – a perversely pleasant, cloying malignancy, promising death the moment its sweetness ever touched a tongue. The lethal, deceptive scent poured off the leviathan in waves.

  ‘That creature,’ Lorgar watched with wide eyes. ‘It wears the armour of the Legions, but I cannot mark its allegiance.’

  Ingethel gestured with its two left arms. Do you see the warriors clad in cardinal red?

  Lorgar couldn’t fail to see them. An entire Legion unknown to him, their bolters crashing as they advanced in mixed ranks with the bellowing Neverborn. Imperial Fists fell back before them, their numbers diminishing with each passing moment.

  They are the Bearers of the Word.

  ‘They…’

  Yes, Lorgar. They are.

  And they were. His Legion, his own loyal sons, armoured in a shade of spilled blood and oxidised iron. Prayer scrolls marked their armour, their piety declared with defiance even as the parchments were ripped and scorched in the heat of battle. Many helms bore horns in mimicry of officer crests, and every shoulder guard showed a daemon’s twisted visage, wrought in blackened bronze.

  Watching them brought their chants to life. Who were these warriors, to adorn themselves in skulls and daemons’ faces, chanting ritual verse as they advanced? What had become of his Legion?

  Ingethel pried the thoughts from Lorgar’s mind. The future holds many changes, primarch.

  He didn’t answer. Lorgar moved among the warring Legionaries, utterly ignored by all of them. The warriors moved to fire around him, but paid no more heed to his existence. With a hesitant shove, he pushed one of the red-clad Word Bearers’ shoulder guards. The warrior cursed at a missed shot, moving aside and adjusting his aim. The bolter started up its thunderous refrain a moment later.

  Surrounded by advancing Legionaries, the primarch looked back to his guide. Ingethel slinked closer, its sinuous, muscled worm’s body parting the crowded warriors with the same ease.

  This moment is fifty years distant from when we stand on Shanriatha.

  ‘Why do they wear red?’

  Ingethel reached to one of the Word Bearers, its nails streaking over the daemonic visage on the warrior’s pauldron. The Legionary hesitated; for a moment Lorgar wondered if the daemon had made their presence known. Instead of noticing them, the warrior reloaded, immediately adding his fire back to the assault.

  The Legion’s old armour was cast aside to herald the changes taking hold of humanity. They are no longer the Bearers of the Emperor’s Word, Lorgar. They are the Bearers of yours.

  ‘This cannot be true.’ The primarch flinched as a bolt shell detonated nearby, killing the Word Bearer closest to him. ‘You have still not told me what that creature is – the one that wears the armour of my Legion five decades from now.’

  He watched it move, its bunched musculature in concert with the exposed power cables and layered crimson ceramite armour. As it pulled one of the Imperial Fists apart with its immense claws, the black smoke misting from its wings was an acidic shadow, slowly eating into the golden armour of every Imperial Fists warrior nearby.

  ‘Throne of the God-Emperor,’ Lorgar whispered. In the great beast’s grip, the bisected Imperial Fist fought on, firing his bolter down into the daemon’s face. The armoured creature hurled the warrior’s legs aside, turning its corrupted helm from the shells cracking against its faceplate. Lorgar watched in silence as the winged daemon slammed the halved Imperial Fist onto its taurine crown, impaling the Legionary on its right horn. That, at last, stilled the warrior’s defiance. His bolter fell from his hands, clattering down the shadow-wrapped wings. The daemon fought on, untroubled by the weight of the armoured torso punctured onto its ivory crest.

  ‘What is that thing?’ the primarch asked again. ‘Its soul is… I do not have the words for it.’ Lorgar stared through the grinding crash of unfolding carnage, peering to see beneath the monstrosity’s flesh. Where a flaring emanation would pulse in a living being, and a hollow chasm would swallow light within one of the Neverborn, this creature possessed both. An ember burned hot
in the blackness beneath its skin.

  ‘It is not human,’ Lorgar’s voice was strained by the effort it took to pierce the black mist shroud rising from the creature’s wings. ‘But it was.’ He turned his eyes to Ingethel. ‘Wasn’t it.’ The words weren’t a question.

  This time, Ingethel’s tone betrayed some of the daemon’s own hesitation. The moment inspired some reluctance, perhaps a reverence, in the daemon itself.

  That is your son, Lorgar. That is Argel Tal.

  A peal of thunder roared from the Eternity Gate itself, as another winged figure landed amidst the melee. Its wings were torn and stained, ragged with rips and the white feathers streaked by blood. Its armour was a shattered ruin of split steel and burnished gold, while its face was masked by a golden helm. The blade in its hands rippled with psychic flame, bright enough to sear the sight from a watcher’s eyes.

  ‘No,’ Lorgar managed to whisper.

  And that is your brother, the daemon pressed. Sanguinius, Lord of Angels. This is how Argel Tal will die.

  LORGAR FROZE AFTER the first step forward. He began a breath in the hall before the Eternity Gate, and released it under a sky tortured by groaning volcanoes.

  The air had a ripeness to it – that spoiled, blackening reek of an open tomb. Despite the horizon aflame and choking on ash from the erupting mountains, little warmth reached his exposed skin. No wind stirred to freshen the air. The ground quivered in a prolonged shudder, giving a low, moaning rumble of tortured tectonics far below the grey earth. The planet itself objected to what was taking place on its surface.

  Lorgar’s vision couldn’t penetrate the blanket of ash swallowing the sky. To cover the heavens like that, the volcanoes had to have been erupting for months, at the very least.

  He turned to the daemon, sensing its approach from behind.

  ‘Where are we? Why did you bring us here?’