Moving across the stars like a line of flame, the rebellion of the turncoat Warmaster, Horus Lupercal, raged on. Inching ever closer to Terra and the throne of his father, the Emperor of Man. Step by step, consuming worlds, shattering the great Imperial design. Horus, first among equals of the primarchs, the Emperor’s gene-forged sons, had embraced treason. And in his wake, nothing remained but ashen, silent battlefields choked with the bodies of the dead, mute witness to the murder of loyalty and honour.

This planet was such a place. Here, the traitors had sealed their revolt with an act of the greatest betrayal, and left behind the corpse of a world to mark the moment. It was a charnel house. A cooling ember thrown from the passing inferno.

Nothing but death lingered.

From the poisoned, churning skies came an iron raptor, moving fast and low across a ruined landscape that had formerly been a magnificent city of great spires and ornate minarets. The Stormbird was the colour of ghosts, and no icons or insignia marked the hull to give trace to its origins. Alone in the wilderness, it settled to the ground in a cloud of dust, a hatch in its flank dropping open.

Three warriors disembarked. Each wore a suit of Mark VI Corvus-pattern power armour, the most advanced build of wargear yet created for the Legiones Astartes. They carried boltguns and power swords, but went without helmets, faces bare to the biting winds. And like their ship, they bore no markings. Sigils of echelon and honour, of Legion and fealty were absent – all save a stylised eye etched into the metal and ceramite. The mark of Malcador the Sigillite, the Regent of Terra and adjutant to the Emperor.

‘Ready your weapons, brothers,’ said Garro. ‘Be watchful.’ He took in the ruined vista, his gaze looking to the far horizon of the battleground. Just one burned world among many, he thought, remembering his first sight of such destruction wrought by the Warmaster’s hand. It seemed like a long time ago. Much had taken place since then. Prospero. Calth. Signus Prime. A litany of worlds engulfed in the fires.

At Garro’s side, Rubio knelt and gathered up a handful of earth, sifting it through the fingers of his gauntlet. About the Codicier’s head, a subtle halo of delicate, crystalline circuitry gave off a faint blue glow. It had been more than a year since his recruitment to Malcador’s duty, and he had yet to make his peace with his changed status.

Rubio closed his eyes and a shudder ran through him, as he allowed his psionic senses to extend and take the measure of the ruins all around them. The invisible traces of human souls littered the landscape, shades of them left in the ethereal like burn shadows after a nuclear detonation. ‘This place,’ he began. ‘There is torment… And so much sorrow.’

‘We know full well what happened here.’ The third warrior bore the aspect of a veteran, the scars of countless conflicts upon a chiselled, granite-hard face. ‘You have no need to rake the ashes and stir the memories of the dead.’ Garro had offered Macer Varren a role as one of Malcador’s operatives after his refusal to follow his kinsmen to Horus’ banner, but in truth, the duty sat poorly with him. Quick to anger like all the World Eaters, he longed to be out in the thick of the war, facing his former battle-brothers. He lacked the cool detachment of the Death Guard or the stoicism of the Ultramarine. ‘Why have you brought us here, Garro? What reason could there possibly be for us to visit these blighted wastes?’

‘Because the Sigillite commands it.’

‘Does he?’ Varren scowled. ‘And with ease, I do not doubt. The halls of the Imperial Palace are a long way from where we stand, brother. A long way from the memory of the atrocities committed in this place.’

The psyker gave a slow nod of agreement. ‘All I sense here is death. Would Lord Malcador have us bring him skulls and bones?’

Garro took a deep breath and gestured around. ‘The scent… Do you smell it? An odour in the air, dry and acrid? Human ash. The remains of countless corpses, reduced to powder, cast to the winds. It is fitting that we set foot on this world. Where this war began, there will be an ending, of sorts.’

Varren eyed him suspiciously. ‘What do you mean? These tasks we completed for the Sigillite, the conscripts we have gathered…’

Garro silenced him with a raised hand. ‘I will tell you what Lord Malcador told me, in the Somnus Citadel on Luna. This will be the last.’

Neither Varren nor Rubio raised their voices to question him, both legionaries reflecting on his words. This ruined world would mark the end of their quest in the Sigillite’s name, and yet all three warriors knew in their marrow that their greater purpose was still yet to be fulfilled.

Far across the shattered city, buildings flattened by orbital strikes lay like great fallen trees. Those few that remained partly intact reached up, broken, skeletal fingers clawing at an overcast sky. Down in the rubble-choked streets, the voice of the wind was the moan of a dying animal, but upon the crumbling ramparts, it was a ceaseless torrent of dust and grit.

From the haze came a twitching, feral figure clad in blackened, war-damaged armour, moving across the rooftops to stand at the very edge of a broken parapet. He opened his arms wide to embrace the windstorm, the ragged, torn cloak at his back snapping like unfurling wings.

‘Shall I die, again?’ His voice was a broken, cracked thing, directed at the sky. ‘Shall I step forwards, into the embrace of gravity? Fall and be dashed upon the broken stones far below? Shall I try… to die again?’ He gave a cold, brittle chuckle. ‘If only it were so simple. If only I could…’ He paused, leaning out, almost as if he were daring fate to claim him. ‘You cannot take me!’ He bellowed the words, a slow burn of mad anger rising within. ‘You do not know me. You do not know my name. I… I am become Cerberus, the wolfhound at the gateway to hell. I am untouched. Do you hear me?’ He filled his augmented lungs and roared. ‘Do you hear?’

The chainsword at his side was as ruined as the rest of his wargear, as broken as his mind, and yet, like those tools, it too could still function. Could still kill. At the push of a power-stud, the ravaged blade stuttered into life.

The one who named himself Cerberus kept speaking, his torrent of words like a hushed litany, like a madman’s confession. ‘This destruction will never end. I have seen into the darkest heart of it. I tasted blood on the blade at the birth. I will see it rage on, and on, and on… For the future will only be war. I see the city as it was and as it is. A nest of traitors spun into treachery by the songs they sang in the night. I see the light of madness in my own eyes. I do not know the face beneath my helm. I see the dead and the dead and the dead. Palaces of corrupted stone. Steel rusted by hate. The killers and the killed. Crying out. Spreading their filth and their poison. I see the Mark of the Three. I know what it means. If nothing else, I know that!’ His eyes searched the gloom below, desperate for prey. ‘I am Cerberus, yes. I have been rejected by death itself. The peace of the grave will only be mine when the scales are balanced. I am the last loyal man under a galaxy of traitor stars… The undying among the dead.’

Then the warrior saw his foe, and he leapt into the air.

‘And I come for you.’

Those who called this world home had not been spared the fate of their planet. Tides of lance fire, kinetic kill rods and the vicious lash of bio-weapon bombardments took their toll. Life was ripped from their flesh, savagely torn away, and yet, even among the ashes of their dead kindred, some pitiful remnants remained. They could not be called human, not any more. The force that animated them was life, but of a kind born of horror and pestilence.

Bodies saved from instant death by happenstance or blind luck, these were the ones who had died slowly in the aftermath. Vomiting up black, tainted blood, choking on their own fouled fluids. These were the unlucky ones, denied the mercy of the quicker kills, their flesh intact enough to become host to colonies of virulent disease. Whatever remained of who they once were had gone. Now they were only vectors for the plague to spread itself, mindless meat-things stumbling in the ruins.

Cerberus hated them. He loathed them with a furious, insane passion that had no end. He hated them as he hated himself; for like the risen dead, he had perished and yet lived, but untouched by their infection.

The unliving fought him, their groaning howls sounding through the mist, but the warrior ripped through their lines like a hurricane, annihilating everything that moved. Death had rejected him, thrown him back. And so he would kill, until it embraced him once more.

‘I am the storm’s blade!’ he screamed at them. ‘I am justice! I am defiance and the oath-keeper!’

And in only moments, all of the creatures were torn apart, and silence fell.

‘I am alone,’ he panted, even as a part of him was longing for the next fight.

Here, at the edge of the dead city, a great plain of blasted land lay churned and broken. Defence bunkers were cracked open like looted tombs, trenches filled with floods of dried, blood-laced mud. Garro, Varren and Rubio marched past the corruption and destruction, into the teeth of the constant, mournful gale.

‘Those winds,’ muttered Rubio. ‘The sound chills the marrow.’

They navigated around deep impact craters, where lakes of toxic water gathered. The rusted, burned-out shells of Land Speeders and assault tanks lay across the silent battlefield. Here and there, the grimy skeletons of soldiers spared the mercy of death by vaporisation.

Garro’s gaze crossed the myriad bodies of the dead. ‘No sane man could look upon this place and not think it a vision of hell.’

‘Hell?’ Varren snorted. ‘There is no such thing. It’s a figment of old idolatry, nothing more. We have no need for a place of horrors beyond death. Horus makes it for us, here in the real.’

The battle-captain did not respond. A glitter of something golden caught his eye, in the lee of an overturned Rhino-class armoured transport. It reflected the weak, watery daylight. Garro approached and found the remains of a man, scraps of a grey-green uniform clinging to blackened bones. He bent down to take a closer look.

Rubio approached him. ‘What is it?’

Garro leaned in, and with a delicacy that belied the bulk of his armoured hand, he plucked a smoke-dirtied icon from the cracked fingers of the corpse. It was a simple chain made of low-purity metal, and hanging from it, a two-headed aquila of the Imperium rendered in gold. It seemed tiny, lying there in the palm of his ceramite gauntlet.

‘The uniform… This one was a soldier in the Imperial Auxilia. A rifleman,’ noted the Codicier.

Garro knew full well what the icon represented. Outwardly, an ordinary trinket, the aquila symbol was a touchstone for those who followed a secret faction within the secular Imperium.

Those who carried such a thing were followers of the Lectitio Divinitatus, they who believed that the Emperor of Mankind was worthy of godhood. These beliefs hid in shadow. They had no churches, no agency but those who believed. The Emperor was the most powerful human being who had ever lived, an immortal psychic of matchless power, and He had dismantled every religion in human history in favour of His great Empire. It was said that the Emperor Himself did not wish to be worshipped as a living deity, but His deeds had taken that choice away from Him. His true divinity was bestowed by those who had faith in His majesty.

Before the civil war, before the treachery, Garro had held to the secular dominions of Imperial Truth. But since then, the things he had seen, the horrors and the miracles… He had been challenged, and along his path, the warrior had found a new, secret faith. ‘The Emperor protects,’ he whispered.

A faint hum of power murmured through Rubio’s psychic hood as he examined the dead man. ‘Those words you speak… As the rifleman perished, they were his last thoughts. How could you know that?’

Garro frowned and let the icon fall from his fingers, and moved away. ‘It does not matter.’

‘Kinsmen! Over here. You should see this.’ Varren was calling them from where he stood at the edge of a wide, low blast crater, and as Garro and the psyker drew close, both legionaries saw that the earth about the hollow had been fused into dull, glassy sheets by some tremendous discharge of heat.

Rubio glanced at Garro. ‘A fusion blast, perhaps?’

The other warrior gave a curt nod.

Varren held a twisted curve of blackened metal in his grip, the fragment trailing broken cables and bunches of fibres that resembled muscle. His face was set in an expression that was equally sorrowful and angered. ‘Another relic of the dead to lay at the bastard Warmaster’s feet.’

Garro’s breath caught in his throat. The fragment was a piece of power armour, a pauldron warped by thermal shock. The original colours of the cracked ceramite sheath were barely discernible, marbled white with dark emerald detail. But it was the scarred, pitted symbol upon the armour piece that, for a moment, robbed Garro of his voice. There, staring back at him, was the device of a white skull on a black sun.

The old sigil of the Death Guard Legion.

He looked away, and with mounting dread, saw what at first he had thought to be more drifts of blasted rubble were actually the scattered remains of legionary wargear, left to rust and decay. Garro’s fingers tightened into fists, and he felt the mirror of Varren’s cold fury rise in him.

‘I know where we stand, World Eater. This place, this graveyard… This is where my battle-brothers perished at Horus Lupercal’s command. Here they died when Mortarion – my own primarch! – gave them up.’ He swallowed a surge of powerful sorrow. ‘You said we should not stir the ashes of the dead, Varren. You are mistaken. We need to hear them. We must listen to the tales of their deaths. And then, on the day the turncoat Warmaster is given his due, we will be their voices.’

The Codicier gave a curt nod, the soft glow of his psychic hood framing his face. ‘I hear them, even now. At the edge of my senses, like the rush of the wind–’

Rubio did not complete his thought. Instead, he suddenly turned in place, bringing up his bolter to the ready, aiming into the gloom. Garro and Varren did the same, ready to face whatever danger the psyker had intuited.

They came out of the smoke-haze slowly and carefully, making every effort to show no fear, and failing with it. What weapons they had were meagre and barely enough to scratch the armour of the legionaries. There were fewer than twenty of them, a haggard and dispirited flock. Young and old, male and female, their bodies malnourished and their faces hollowed with hunger and fatigue.

Varren was incredulous. ‘Survivors? Here? And common men at that! It’s not possible…’

‘It would seem otherwise,’ said Rubio. ‘If they had made it to a refuge, waited until the bio-agents dissipated…’ He trailed off, examining their faces.

‘Do not underestimate the will to live,’ added Garro. ‘You need not be a legionary to possess that trait.’ He turned to address the survivors. ‘Lower your weapons in the presence of the Emperor’s Space Marines, or answer for it.’

A mutter of surprise passed through the group. An older man in a torn military jumpsuit stepped forwards and gestured for the others to do as Garro had commanded. Doffing his forage cap, he took a few paces closer. ‘Space Marines, you say? Of what Legion are you, lord? Your colours are unfamiliar.’ His accent had the distinctive tones of a Cambric-born, a people of hardy stock from a system in the Segmentum Solar.

‘You dare to question us?’ Varren hissed. ‘We carry the Mark of the Sigillite!’

‘All you need know is that we serve the Emperor of Mankind,’ Garro told him.

‘Not Horus Lupercal?’ The Cambrican asked the question with raw fear in his eyes.

Garro gave him a pitiless glare. ‘The oath-breaker Horus, and all those who side with him, have been declared Excommunicate Traitoris by the Council of Terra. Now you will answer my questions. Who are you, and how did you survive the virus bombs?’

The man told them his name was Arcudi. He had been a deck-captain in the motive crew aboard a Titan, Arc Bellus, but the war machine had been crippled and beheaded early in the battle with the traitors. Arcudi explained how he and some of his men escaped into the city even as the bombardment began. They took shelter in a series of underground transit tunnels, moving to the deepest levels as the bombs fell. By sheer, blind luck they had become sealed in down there, buried under tons of rockcrete and stone. Many had perished as they worked to dig themselves out, and in the months that passed, the battle above their heads burned itself out. The turncoats had moved on.

‘We have been crossing the great span of the city on foot, but the passage has taken a long time,’ he went on. ‘We move only at the speed of our slowest. We are searching for a way to flee this dead world. A ship, if such a thing can be found intact. But our morale and our strength runs thin, my lord. We endured such hardships… Such horrors…’

Varren’s lip curled. ‘We cannot help you. We have a mission here. Your circumstances are not part of it.’

‘You would leave them to die?’ snapped Rubio, dismayed by the World Eater’s callous words.

Arcudi held out his hands in entreaty. ‘Please, help us! If you truly are loyal to Terra… I have always believed, the Emperor protects…’ Tears filled his rheumy eyes. ‘The Emperor protects!’

‘What did you say?’ Garro strode over to the old soldier, and he stiffened in fear. Arcudi did not resist as the warrior took his arm and pulled back the ragged, torn sleeve of his tunic. There, about the soldier’s wrist, was a gold chain with an icon of an aquila. Garro gently released his grip. ‘The Emperor protects. He does indeed. And here and now, we three are the instruments of His will. You will come with us.’

Varren’s craggy face creased in a frown. ‘This is a mistake. We are not here to rescue a litter of wounded strays!’

Garro gave the other warrior a hard look. ‘You do not know the letter of Malcador’s orders for this mission. Or do you believe you would be more suited to direct this duty than I?’

Varren said nothing, and at length shook his head. Still, his soured expression spoke volumes. On some level, Garro knew the other legionary was correct, but it was clear that Arcudi and many of his group were also followers of the Lectitio Divinitatus. And whatever duty the battle-captain had to the Sigillite, his faith in the Emperor transcended it.

Arcudi saw something in his eyes and spoke to him in careful, conspiratorial tones. ‘He sent you. I prayed and He sent you. The moment we saw daylight again, I knew we would be delivered… If only we could escape the beast…’

‘Beast?’ Varren caught the scent of terror around the word and eyed the old man.

‘Explain yourself, deck-captain,’ Garro prompted.

A new fear, strong and potent, shimmered in the soldier’s eyes, and he threw a worried glance over his shoulder. ‘There is a revenant that prowls the ruins of the city, lords. A terrible, monstrous thing. It has been stalking us. I have seen it. A hulking form, wreathed in a tattered cloak, stinking of blood and death. It has already killed many of us, returning again and again to prey upon our numbers. I fear it will end us all before we can find safety.’

Arcudi’s terror lingered in the air like the dust in the wind, and something in his description sounded a cold, steady clarion in Garro’s mind. When he spoke again, he spoke to all. ‘This revenant. If it is beyond you to defeat it, then we will do so in your stead. We will not wait for an attack to come.’ He glanced towards Varren and Rubio. ‘Brothers, ready yourselves. We will take the fight to this beast. We will battle it on our terms.’

‘Every man who has tried has perished,’ Arcudi warned.

Garro nodded. ‘We are not men. We are legionaries.’ He pointed back towards the ruins. ‘Show us where to find this thing.’

In the centre of the city, a building that had once defied the beauty of the heavens now lay collapsed in upon itself. A basilica of stately and imposing character, now reduced to a hill of dust-caked rubble and broken glassaic.

Inside the fallen structure, there were still cavernous spaces, slope-shouldered voids where support columns of marble had fractured but not fallen. Successive damage wrought by fires and the sluice of acidic rains made the bombed-out building a dangerous place.

Any mistake of footing could bring down a precariously supported wall or swallow a gap in a heartbeat. And yet the warrior returned to the basilica time and again, drawn back here by a compulsion he could neither understand nor deny.

Cerberus picked his way across the rubble, in the gloom and the damp air, returning to the place of his rebirth. A silent, ruined figure in scarred armour waited there, slumped against the remains of a broken lectern.

‘I am here once more, brother. Cerberus is here. Will you speak to me this day?’

There was no reply. There was no sound but the drip of water on stone.

It was here that he had died. Here, that he had reawakened, buried beneath the debris and the stone. It was here in this memorial to wanton destruction that he had dug himself out, driven by a single-mindedness that bordered on lunacy.

‘If you will not speak to me, brother, I will talk to you. I will tell the tale again, and take the pain. Do you remember it? I know you do. How many times must I ask you to share the moment with me? I search my own thoughts and there are voids. Dark places. Broken shards of memory. Jagged, and harsh.’

He gave a low moan of pain. All attempt at recollection brought agony unlike any other. Razors, clawing across the surface of his mind. Fire enveloping his soul.

And yet, he still tried to grasp it.

As Cerberus struggled to pull the memories out of his tortured thoughts, the phantom traces of gunfire, of screams, rose with them. He experienced anew the clash of sword on sword, the shriek of falling bombs. ‘I will see! You and I in these halls… The traitors at the lectern… The hate in them! The Ruinous Powers! The sword… This sword in my hand. Stop! Stop! You must not! Stay your hand!’ He collapsed to his knees, feeling the misery of those moments anew in a flash of brutal, terrible empathy. ‘Do not do this!’

And yet, for all the agony he endured, his fractured mind could not bring him the understanding he so desperately wanted. No measure of truth made itself clear to him. The precious, ephemeral knowledge of himself remained forever out of reach. This death-that-was-no-death had done that to him. The betrayal and the fire, the blades and the bombs, the wounds they gave him bled out his spirit into the stones. Lost and forgotten. He lived through that moment once more.

‘Betrayal… Madness and betrayal…’ Each word was agony for him. ‘The red god… And darkness… Darkness…’

He collapsed, fighting to breathe like a drowning man pulled from a lake. In that death, the warrior had been broken inside. Some vital part of the man he was had been torn open, the fragments of him spilling into the dust.

Ruined and burned, time held him in its cradle as the war passed about him. The line of flame moved on, and he was left behind. Discarded by the turncoats in the ashen wastes.

‘Brother… Kinsman! Each time the death cuts closer, but still I am rejected. You know why. Will you not tell me?’ Hand over hand, he dragged himself across the rubble. ‘Death took you! Why not me? Why not me?!’ With a sudden burst of furious energy, he launched himself across the broken stones, to where the other figure lay slumped upon the lectern. ‘Speak to me!’

But no answer would ever come. The warrior’s brother lay dead and mouldering, as he had every day since the ignition of the rebellion. His kinsman’s neck ended in a bloody stump, his severed head lying in his lap. Blackened crusts of dried fluid surrounded the pale, bloodless lips. Sightless eyes, set in a ruined face tended by flies and slow rot, stared out at nothing.

‘I am sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I wish I could remember your name, brother. Please forgive me.’ The warrior looked down at his hands. His body seemed disconnected from his thoughts, as if they belonged to some other being. And in that instant, he felt the briefest touch of lucidity. ‘What has been done to me? Who–’

A rattle of stones sounded across the broken chamber as rocks were dislodged by the shifting of weight. The warrior fell silent, sensing movement somewhere above, and the moment was gone.

‘Who dares?’ he growled, rising to his feet, drawing his battered chainsword and finding the answer to his own question. ‘Intruders.’

Night had fallen across the shattered cityscape, and the broken spires and toppled towers became a nest of shadows and darkened spaces. Acres of windowless voids glared out like black, predatory eyes, and the wind never ceased.

Garro led the others on their approach, but at distance the old soldier skidded to a halt and refused to go any closer. ‘This is the place. The beast is in there.’

‘Are you certain?’ asked Varren.

Arcudi nodded nervously as Rubio studied the fallen structure. ‘It appears to be the remains of an official building.’

‘I saw ten men enter with intent to kill the beast,’ said the old man. ‘I heard them dying only seconds later. This is where the killer hides. On some nights, the screams of torment it makes are carried to us on the wind.’

Garro’s hand went to the hilt of Libertas. ‘Return to the rest of your group,’ he ordered. ‘Varren, go with him.’

‘What?’ The World Eater glared at him, affronted. ‘You put me aside?’

The two legionaries locked gazes, and Garro lowered his voice. ‘I give you a command, brother. Remain here. Watch Arcudi and his people. Be on the alert.’

Varren’s reply, when it came, was cold and sullen. ‘As you wish.’

Garro watched him go, then turned to Rubio. ‘What do you see?’

The psyker studied the tumbledown remnants of the building, peering into the stone, measuring the telepathic resonance of the air around them. His face was lit by the glow of his hood’s crystalline mechanism. ‘I am uncertain,’ he admitted. ‘Emotion clouds this place like smoke. It is difficult to filter out the noise. So many died here. So many voices.’

‘I only need you to find one.’

Rubio nodded and closed his eyes, the blue aura of the psy-matrix casting strange, jumping shadows. Garro felt the air tingle with a metallic tang, the trace of psionic spoor, a tiny measure of the immaterium crossing into the real world.

Garro watched Rubio work his art, the psyker’s hands moving as if feeling in the dark for something unseen. The talents of espers, psychics and warp-seers had always seemed strange and alien to him, even in the days when he had fought as a battle-captain in the Great Crusade. The Sigillite had given Garro leave to employ Rubio’s prohibited skills as he saw fit, with no word of censure. What that meant for the future, Garro could only guess at.

‘Something… Someone is here with us,’ said Rubio, breaking the silence. ‘But the shadow of the mind is unusual. In the past, I have read those recently dead and seen the echoes of who they were, like the rifleman. This is the same, but it is a mind that yet lives. Almost as if his thoughts are caught between life and death.’

‘We shall find him, then, and learn to which extreme he lies. Come with me.’

But Rubio held out a hand and halted Garro before he could enter the ruins. ‘And what will you tell this tortured soul when we find him? The Emperor protects?’

‘If you have something to say to me, brother, I would hear it,’ Garro said sharply.

The psyker’s hand dropped away, but he held the former Death Guard’s steady gaze. ‘Varren was correct. Arcudi and the survivors are not our concern. Our duty is our sole focus. I learned that hard lesson when you recruited me on Calth.’

‘I give the orders. Lord Malcador chose me as his Agentia Primus.’

‘Aye, he did,’ agreed Rubio. ‘But this is not the first time I have heard you say those words, Garro. The Emperor protects. They have more meaning than you will admit to. And those aquila icons, too. They are more than mere trinkets.’

Garro said nothing, watching the younger legionary carefully. Was Rubio probing his surface thoughts even as he spoke? How would he react to learn that Nathaniel Garro, hero of the Eisenstein, chosen of the Sigillite, dallied with belief in a deity?

The psyker answered the question. ‘It matters little to me what you may hide, Garro. We each have our daemons and our secrets. But be sure that you do not allow your agenda to come into conflict with our sworn oath.’

‘That will never come to pass,’ he insisted.

Rubio drew his weapons and pointed with his battle sword. ‘Lead the way, then.’

Garro led the way into the fallen basilica with Libertas held out before him, and Rubio followed close behind. His eyes narrowed as they picked out shadows among the broken stonework. Here and there, bottomless black pits fell away into the spaces below the massive building, where sublevels had collapsed into one another.

Taking care with his footing, Garro cast a look down at an electromatic device hanging from his belt, and frowned. ‘Readings from the auspex are confused. The metals within the wreckage fog the sensors. Do you have anything, Rubio?’

The Codicier heard his own voice, as if it were coming to him from a great distance away. ‘There are ghosts in this place. Be content you do not hear them.’ The echoes of the dead were everywhere, thick as mist.

‘What do they say?’

‘What all ghosts say. They want revenge.’

Garro studied the other warrior for a moment, and Rubio could tell he was uncertain if the psyker was telling the truth or mocking him. Ultimately, he decided not to press the matter and turned away, spying something in the shadows.

Rubio saw it too, a distinctly human silhouette amid the broken beams and cracked supports. He recognised the familiar shape of Maximus-pattern battle armour. Garro approached the figure, sword raised. ‘You. Stand and face us.’

‘It would be a horror if he did so,’ Rubio told him, reaching out with his mind and finding nothing. ‘No spirit remains in that one. He is long dead.’

‘You are regrettably correct,’ Garro allowed, moving closer. What at first appeared to be a bowed head was in fact the ragged stub of a neck. He looked away, disgust colouring his expression. ‘This is no way for a legionary to be remembered,’ he added.

As Rubio’s gaze cast around, searching in the damp corners of the chamber, Garro examined the damaged armour. ‘Blast marks here. The gouges are from the edge of a power blade.’ He paused, then brushed at the surface of the cracked ceramite. ‘The livery… Beneath the dust, the colours and insignia are still visible. This warrior was a captain of the Sixteenth Legion.’

The psyker stiffened, his preternatural abilities grasping something beyond Garro’s ability to sense. ‘The Legion of Horus Lupercal.’

Rubio’s words were suddenly drowned out as a caped abomination burst from beneath the rubble at his feet. Buried there, waiting for them, it now exploded into violence. The Codicier barely had a moment to react before a snarling chainblade came roaring down on him. Blocking with his vambrace, ceramite armour meeting tungsten teeth with a flash of brilliant yellow sparks.

He caught the briefest glimpse of a scowling, furious face before a renewed, savage attack was unleashed upon him. The pommel of the chainsword slammed into his head, fracturing bone and shattering psionic crystal. He stumbled, fighting to regain his balance, but the assault was psychotic in its intensity. Dimly, he was aware of Garro coming to his aid, but his foe howled with laughter and tore an object from the depths of his tattered cloak.

‘My tomb will be yours, traitor bastards!’

‘Krak grenade!’ Garro’s shout of warning sounded as the fist-sized device went bouncing and skittering away across the uneven floor.

The cloaked warrior knocked Rubio down and left them behind, sprinting towards the tumbledown entrance. In a single, lightning-fast motion, Garro captured the grenade where it had fallen and threw it with all his might into the black depths of the nearest sinkhole. Rubio heard it clatter its way into the collapsed underlevels.

‘Run, damn you!’ bellowed the Death Guard, but in the next second Rubio was deafened by a shuddering crash of detonation. All around, the fractured walls and drooping ceiling surrendered to gravity and came down upon them.

After months of slow decrepitude, the basilica was finally destroyed. It collapsed in a last outburst of black dust and displaced air, falling into the abyss that cracked open beneath it. The earth swallowed the ruins, dragging them into the dark.

Varren staggered backwards as a massive shock-front of powdered rock and earth reached for him. He heard the panicked cries of Arcudi and the rest of the survivors, and ignored them, calling into his vox-bead, ‘Throne and Blood! Garro! Rubio! Do you hear me?’

There was no response, and he watched, his boltgun in his hand, as the great flood of dust rolled in and engulfed the survivor camp where he stood guard.

‘All of you, get down!’ He snarled the order at the cowering refugees. ‘Cover your faces and do not move.’

‘I warned them…’ said Arcudi. ‘The beast comes.’

‘Be silent, old man.’ Varren bit down on a flash of annoyance at the old soldier’s morose pronouncement, and checked his bolter’s magazine. ‘Stay down.’

He heard the flutter of a torn cape, and so did Arcudi. ‘What was that? In the dust cloud–’

‘I said be silent!’ Grim-faced, Varren drew up his bolter to his shoulder and aimed into the haze, searching for the one errant motion that would give him a target. All else was forgotten. The fate of his battle-brothers was not his concern. All he sought now was the enemy he knew was coming.

A voice muttered, out in the dust. ‘Traitors are paid only in steel, and you will pay for defying the Emperor!’ Before he could react, something moved, a form like a leaping wolf or a raptor given wing. Varren glimpsed the dull glitter of a chainsword looming and he opened fire. The legionary saw his enemy come running.

‘The beast!’ howled Arcudi, as the armoured figure came charging in with a roar.

The two warriors collided with a clash of weapons. ‘You are dead!’ the attacker screamed wildly. ‘You are all dead!’

Even as every instinct in him called out for him to meet this foe in rage and battle, Varren tried to halt the tirade before it went too far. ‘Stop!’ he bellowed. ‘You cannot fight–’

‘In the Emperor’s name, I will destroy you!’

The words were ignored and pain lanced through him. In the training pits of the World Eaters Legion, Varren had battled warriors of every stripe, from those pure of body and mind, to those driven to the edge of madness with lobotomaic taps and neural implants. But still, he was staggered by the sheer venom with which this new enemy attacked. Every legionary, no matter what his parent Legion might be, no matter what primarch he called his sire, fought to live and to win. This beast did no such thing. He fought like a madman, with no thought to survival. Everything about him was pure fury.

He fought as if he craved the embrace of death itself, but in his eyes, there was something lost.

‘Damn you!’ Varren bit down on another shudder of agony.

‘Too late for that!’ came the reply. He was pulled off his feet and slammed against a broken stone pillar. His bolter left his grip and Varren slumped, half dazed from the force of the blow. He turned, bringing up his guard to defend against any killing strike, but his foe had left him behind.

‘This will do…’ He blinked through the pain and saw the ragged warrior gather up his boltgun and work the slide. Then, he marched slowly towards Arcudi and the survivors, who quaked in fear at the sight of the cloaked figure, the bolter’s wide muzzle turning in their direction.

Varren dragged himself back to his feet. ‘What are you doing? They are civilians!’

No glimmer of remorse crossed the warrior’s scarred face as he opened fire on the unarmed people. ‘I am Cerberus!’ he declared. ‘The gatekeeper of hell! I am justice!’

‘Not in this world!’ came a shout. Varren lurched around and saw Garro and Rubio emerge from the haze. Wounded, but still very much alive, the other Knights Errant had dug themselves out of the rubble and returned to the fray.

Rubio threw out his hands in a gesture of power. The psyker tapped into the quickening at the heart of his warp-touched soul and turned it to lightning. With a sweep of his arm, an arc of crackling blue-white power blasted across the debris-strewn ground and tore it open. The ragged warrior – this so-called ‘Cerberus’ – cried out in pain and tumbled over the edge of a new abyss, into black oblivion. All around, the earth shook and caved in, howling and grinding before finally settling once more.

By degrees, the dust fell, coating everything in a thick layer of grit and ashes. His injuries sending brutal jags of pain through him with every step, Varren limped to the edge of the cave-in. In passing, he saw the survivors tending to their wounded; there were precious few of them. Almost all of Cerberus’ shots had blasted their targets into smears of blood and meat.

Varren spat blood into the new crater and glared down into it. He saw only shadows.

‘Is he dead?’ Garro approached, his armour caked in the same dark ashes.

‘No. There would be a body.’ Varren turned away, looking the other legionaries up and down. ‘I might have said the same about you. The ruins fell, and I thought that was an end to you.’

‘We were trapped for a moment,’ said Rubio, ‘but my gifts made escape possible.’

‘It will take more than the collapse of a building to kill a legionary,’ said Garro. ‘What happened here?’

‘Rubio’s smiting blast struck true, but the stone beneath the foe’s feet gave way. This entire city is nothing but layers of rubble and ruins, one atop the other.’ Varren cast a look towards Arcudi and the remains of his party. He knew full well that Cerberus would have ended them all, had Rubio not intervened. He glanced at Garro, and fixed him with a steady gaze. ‘That was no beast, battle-captain.’ Varren had expected to face some kind of warp-spawned monster, but not what could only be a gene-forged warrior-born. ‘That was one of us.’

‘Aye. It must be so.’ The psyker’s expression soured. ‘He called us traitors. I saw only a glimpse down there…’ His gaze swept up to meet Garro’s. ‘Tell us the truth. Is this enemy what I think it is?’

Garro’s expression hardened. The burden of the question appeared to age him. ‘Yes. I see now that he is too far gone. He has been consumed by madness. What happened here has broken his mind.’ He looked away. ‘He must be killed.’

‘What?’ Varren felt a strange jolt of emotion. Was that… empathy? Despite the killer’s crazed assault, the World Eater could not help feeling some strange kind of kinship with Cerberus. We are alike, he thought. I could be him, had circumstances played out another way.

Rubio nodded sadly. ‘We all saw what he did. He ignored us in favour of attacking defenceless civilians. Old men. Women and children.’

‘You did not look in his eyes, psyker,’ spat Varren. ‘You did not see what I did. Torment and blackness. Can your witch-sight divine that?’ He struggled to articulate himself. ‘My words before… I was wrong. He is a beast. A man become an animal. But he is still one of us. He is not a traitor.’

‘I could not touch his mind,’ admitted the psyker. ‘The turmoil there is too strong, like a great maelstrom.’

Varren reached out and grabbed the battle-captain’s arm, his craggy face lit with purpose. ‘Garro, heed me. We have lost so many brothers to this schism, this damned bloody war. A traitor I will kill without hesitation. But we do not speak of a traitor. Our kinsman is lost. You must–’

‘What I must do.’ Garro snarled the words back at him, for a moment furious at the legionary’s demands. Then the heat faded and the weight of the words seemed to settle on him. ‘What I must do is make the choice. It is my duty, and mine alone, Varren. If I give an order, then so shall it be. Do you understand?’

It took the World Eater a long time to reply. ‘I understand,’ he lied.

The dawn came slowly, the weak glow of a distant sun casting only the most ghostly light upon the destroyed city. The dust and the clouds robbed everything of shade, rendering all things in grey. The only patches of colour came from the spills of blood around the bodies of the dead and the wounded.

While Garro and Varren stood watch, Rubio walked among the survivors, the coppery scent of their blood strong in his nostrils.

He found Arcudi dressing an injury on his arm with a length of dirty cloth, surrounded by the weary remnants of his band. ‘I can spare you a medicae pack, deck-captain. There are bandages and–’

‘No,’ Arcudi replied, almost too quickly. ‘No need, legionary. It is nothing, a scratch at best. Of no concern.’

‘As you wish. Perhaps one of the others, then? I see there are some in your group with greater wants.’

The soldier shook his head. ‘Your offer is well taken. But I must refuse. Please understand. It is our way.’

‘To bleed?’ The psyker gave the old man a hard look; he sensed what could be the gossamer touch of a lie in Arcudi’s thoughts, but he could not be certain of it. When the soldier did not reply, Rubio relented and walked away. Perhaps I should not be surprised, he thought. It was legionaries who brought this destruction down on them, a legionary who stalked and murdered their number. Why should they wish to trust us?

Still, he could not shake a steady sense of disquiet. He came across a line of corpses arranged in a row, all of them wrapped in makeshift death shrouds. Compelled by an impulse he could not express, a half-formed suspicion that welled up in his chest, Rubio knelt by the closest of them. With care, the psyker took the arm of a dead woman and opened her sleeve, letting his preternatural senses guide him. His gaze traced the length of the pallid limb and found something strange.

There were contusions and scarring, as he expected, but the corpse-flesh showed something more. Lesions, of a kind Rubio had never seen. He was no Apothecary, but he had seen radiation burns and cancerous growths before. The flesh-marks resembled those kind of injuries, but it was the pattern that struck him as odd. Whatever afflicted the dead woman manifested in triangular threefold clusters, almost like a deliberate mark. Rubio examined another body, and then a third. Each showed the same strange infection, each time hidden away from plain sight.

‘What are you doing?’ He looked up as Garro approached, a searching look on the battle-captain’s face. ‘Why do you disturb their dead?’

The psyker showed him the marks. ‘Have you ever seen the like, Garro?’

Even as he asked the question, Rubio saw the answer to it in the other warrior’s expression. Disgust, anger, hatred – all these emotions swept across Garro’s face in an instant. Behind him, Arcudi and the other survivors had stopped and turned to watch the legionaries.

‘I have seen such a mark before,’ said Garro, with cold ferocity. ‘And it is the herald of horror and ruination.’

In the depths of the warp, aboard the frigate Eisenstein, Nathaniel Garro and his battle-brothers had fought beings touched by the same threefold sign. They were the dead, traitors from the Death Guard Legion, bodies reanimated to new and pestilent life by some dark power from the immaterium. Those undying creatures were animated by disease and raw hate, driven by corruption – and now that same power swarmed here in the ruins, hiding in plain sight.

‘You were not meant to lay your eyes upon the mark.’ Arcudi’s voice was solemn and full of regret. ‘Now you too must meet the blessing of the Grandfather.’ The old soldier looked Garro in the eyes and smiled. ‘He has been waiting for you, Nathaniel.’

Then as one, the survivors threw back their heads and screamed. It was the same mournful howl as the blighted winds that scoured the surface of the planet.

Arcudi’s skin sloughed from his face, a papery mask of decaying flesh crumbling into fragments in the blink of an eye. All around, his cohorts transformed too, any pretence at humanity falling from them in shed rags of flesh. Pallor burst across their faces, torrents of triad scabs bursting into livid, pus-wet blushes. They shed their disguise, revealing themselves to truth.

Whatever dark potential had kept them balanced on the edge of life now withdrew, and in turn accelerated them into decay. What a moment ago had seemed human became stumbling, moaning carcasses. At their sides, the cold-skinned corpses twitched and rose to their feet, torn and bloodied flesh hanging off them, limbs ruined by bolt-fire.

Varren came running, his weapon at his side. He was aghast at the sight before him. ‘That sound!’

‘A call to their kindred,’ said Garro, drawing his weapons. ‘We are betrayed, brothers… Curse me for a fool.’

‘Combat wheel formation!’ Rubio sprang back, closing the gap with his comrades. ‘They surround us.’

Swords drawn, boltguns raised, the three legionaries drew together as the undead shambled forwards, gathering around them.

Garro raised Libertas. ‘Destroy these abominations, in the Emperor’s name!’

The creatures rushed forwards, into the flash of gunfire and the shriek of swords as the legionaries dispatched them.

They fell like wheat before a scythe, and Rubio let out a harsh bark of laughter. ‘These few, they are no match for us!’

In answer to him, a new chorus of wraithlike howling sounded out of the ruined cityscape, and the rasping of decayed limbs on cracked stone grew louder and louder. Hundreds of the horrors stumbled brokenly out of blackened doorways and caved-in passages.

‘You spoke too soon, psyker,’ Varren grated. ‘There’s a lot more than a few.’

‘We are the countless dead.’ The thing that had been Arcudi wavered before them, pressed forwards by the mass of its corpse-fellows. ‘Join us.’ From every shadowed corner they came, digging themselves from the rubble, rushing from the ruins, emerging from every shallow grave. A horde of the undying fell on them in a howling tide, overwhelming the legionaries by their sheer force of numbers.

‘Never!’ Garro shouted his denial back at the creature and Libertas sang in the air once more. The sword rose and fell as he took the heads from the necks of the corpse-things, but for each plague-ridden victim he dispatched, three more arose to take its place. The press of dead flesh was forcing them back, cutting off all lines of escape.

Rubio called upon his powers to cast bolts of snarling energy into the mass of them, but he could not hold back the flood. ‘They just keep coming!’

‘Must we face every victim taken by the virus bombs?’ snarled Varren, his own weapons a blur of steel and fire. ‘How can they die and yet live?’

‘Cerberus,’ said Garro. ‘He must have known what they were all along.’ A thunder of shots blasted apart more of the pestilent monstrosities. ‘Stay close, brothers! If we perish here, then we will perish together.’

But then a new voice joined the chorus of madness. Like the summons of some mythic creature, the mention of his name had brought Cerberus to the fray.

‘I see you!’ came the distant cry. ‘I come for you!’

The ragged warrior was suddenly there, a whirlwind of blades, taking heads and ripping open torsos. The undying monstrosities were torn apart, limbs rended, skin carved by the spinning razor-sharp teeth of the chainsword. The legionary in his ruined armour was a black phantom, and he fought like the spirit of vengeance itself, never tiring, never faltering, ignoring every clawed slash and clubbing blow upon his wargear, his blood flowing freely from countless wounds. And still he battled on, killing the dead, returning the pox-riddled flesh-puppets to the bombed-out tombs they had crawled from. In his eyes there was only the pathological, perfect focus of the true madman.

In this deadly melee, Garro would take whatever reinforcements would offer themselves. ‘The numbers thin, do not falter,’ he called out to the others. ‘We must survive. Our duty must be done!’

‘Finish them!’ Rubio barely got the words out before a mob of undead dragged him off his feet and to the ground. The psyker stumbled under a surge of corrupted bodies and they slammed him to the ground. He vanished under a mass of snarling undead, their taloned fingers raking at his armour.

But only for a moment. A wash of telekinetic energy turned the creatures into new drifts of ashy powder, and Varren strode in to bring his comrade to his feet, slashing with his power sword to behead any foes that still moved. ‘In Terra’s name, tell me there are no more of these rotting freaks.’

Rising, Rubio shook his head. ‘The fight’s not done yet.’

Varren turned to see Garro stride towards Cerberus, as the maddened legionary fought his way through the last mass of the undying.

The chainsword fell, trailing a rope of old, spoiled blood through the air, and the ruins fell silent again, save for the endless winds. All about him lay a mass grave of decapitated corpses, bodies in varying states of pestilent decay heaped atop one another.

Panting, the warrior who called himself Cerberus looked up, his kill-fury high and ready, and found a legionary in grey, unadorned battle armour advancing to him.

‘Enough,’ said Garro. ‘The deed is done. The enemy dispatched.’

The words were enough to stoke the ragged warrior’s rage still higher. ‘You dare command me? Traitor swine! I’ll salt the earth with your blood!’

Garro let the tip of his blade drop and returned his spent bolter to the mag-plate holster on his back. ‘Lower your sword,’ he said carefully. ‘Don’t force me to make the choice… Do not make me fight you.’

‘Never!’ Cerberus screamed his denial to the sky. ‘I will never stop! I am the last loyal son! I will end all Horus sends to test me!’

‘This is your last chance.’ Varren’s earlier words echoed in Garro’s thoughts, the World Eater’s demands that they try to end Cerberus’ rampage without further bloodshed. Too many brothers lost. Too many. ‘Refuse and you will die!’

‘Do your worst!’ He attacked, and if anything, the fury Cerberus had displayed moments before was now revealed as only the spark of the flame burning inside him.

As their swords met, clashed and met again, Garro saw this lost soul for what he truly was. Through a hurricane of blows, sparks leaping as metal ground on metal, he glimpsed fragments of the man behind the madness. Garro was tested with every attack and riposte. He knew in an instant that this was one of the most lethal foes he had ever faced in the arena of blades. Every strike, parried. Every lunge met in kind.

Warrior to warrior, they fought and fought. Time stretched until there was only the moment, and the fight caught within it. They struggled back and forth, seeking tiny nicks and cuts but never finding the defining blow. Each was the equal of the other; they battled on in search of the single fractional instant of inattention that would mean a death-strike.

Sword hilts locked, and suddenly they were struggling against their coiled, enhanced muscles. ‘I know what you are!’ hissed Cerberus. ‘Traitor! Liar!’

‘I know what you are,’ Garro shot back. ‘Like me. A legionary! The man the Sigillite sent me to find!’

‘Deceiver! I am Cerberus! The wolfhound at the gates of hell! I am death denied!’ Spittle flew from his mouth with every murderous shout, and his eyes were black pits of despair.

‘Your mind is clouded, brother.’ Garro put every iota of his strength into holding the swords in lock. ‘Help me. Break through the veil of madness!’ He met those dark eyes with an unflinching gaze. ‘Remember who you are!’

‘I am Cerberus!’ Striking out with all his might, the warrior batted Garro away with a brutal blow and staggered backwards, opening up the distance between them. He pointed his sword to where Varren and Rubio stood poised to join the fray. ‘Bring your bastard brothers in, if you dare. I’ll finish you all!’

Garro shook off the flashes of pain in his head and held up his hand before the other legionaries could make their approach. ‘This matter will be put to rest between us.’

‘You die first, then,’ snarled his opponent. ‘They will follow you in short order.’

Desperation tore at him. ‘Listen to me!’ Garro drew himself up. ‘Cerberus is a myth! It is the name of a legend, a story, nothing more. It is not your name. It is not who you are.’ Finally, in the instant between heartbeats, he saw doubt flicker in those depthless, crazed eyes. There was a moment of hesitation, and Garro seized upon it. If he failed now, then death would be the only conclusion. ‘I am Nathanial Garro, Knight Errant of Malcador the Sigillite.’ He drew his sword to him, as if he were at a ceremony of arms. ‘I am a loyal servant of the Emperor of Man. And you–’

The ragged warrior froze where he stood, and he seemed to falter beneath an invisible force. The gravity of his existence was crumbling as Garro watched. Whatever shell of madness that had hardened around him was cracking open. The trauma that smothered this brother in battle was finally loosening its grip on his war-damaged sanity.

‘Who am I?’ he whispered, sorrow and fear beneath the words. He looked down at his hands, as if seeing them for the first time, then cast around at the sight of the ruins surrounding them. ‘What is this place?’

Garro gave voice to the name, to the last of the secrets he had been carrying since the moment Malcador had given him his list of recruits to recover. He spoke the words that would make this final one, the last of the Knights Errant. ‘Your name is Garviel Loken. This world is Isstvan Three, where your primarch Horus Lupercal and your battle-brothers betrayed you, and left you to perish.’

‘No…’ He shook his head, denying it.

Garro nodded sadly. ‘Yes, brother. You know this truth. You have not forgotten.’

The scream that left his lips was a howl of pure pain, the sound of a man’s soul being sundered, the thunder of betrayal’s knife cutting deep into his hearts. He flew at Garro in a mad rage, his cloak snapping around him. ‘I have no brothers! Only traitors remain! I am a Legion of one, and I will kill you all, until death comes to claim me!’

Garro opened his hand and released the hilt of Libertas, letting the power sword fall free from his fingers and clatter to the dead earth. ‘Then do so,’ he said, tipping back his head and showing his bare throat. The scarred warrior raised his chainsword, the roaring blade hesitating at the apex of the motion. ‘I cannot best you,’ Garro admitted. ‘So I offer no defence. Only a choice. The same that faced me when I came to this world. If you kill me, you murder a kinsman, an ally. That single act will make you the traitor. You know this.’ He held the other warrior’s gaze. ‘Brother. Join us, and prove that you are still loyal to the Emperor.’

‘The Emperor…’ He grasped at the words, anxious to understand them.

‘The Emperor protects,’ said Garro, fully knowing that his death or life now rested in the hands of a broken, damaged spirit. But I have faith, he told himself.

The chainsword’s spinning teeth clattered to a halt and the weapon fell.

‘Yes,’ said Loken. ‘He does.’

Where blades had failed, words and deeds brought victory. Garro reflected on this truth and felt a new certainty course through him. Even the deepest pits of madness could not blight the allegiance and fidelity of a true legionary, and if that were so, then there was still hope in the darkest reaches of the insurrection. Now the last of the lost sons had been found and Malcador’s mission was complete, Garro allowed himself to wonder what would come next.

Before, with the names of those yet to be found at the fore of his thoughts and deeds, it had been a simple matter for Garro to put aside the questions that dogged him through his duty. The questions that Rogal Dorn’s words had thrown into harsh relief, the questions he had silenced in himself aboard the Daggerline and later in the aftermath of Voyen’s revelations.

He could not silence them any longer.

Varren’s heavy footfalls crunched over the rubble, and Garro looked to him. He jerked a thumb at the drop-ship across the way, waiting in the ruins of a tumbledown plaza. ‘The Stormbird is ready to depart.’ The vessel’s thrusters were already idling, and Rubio was climbing aboard. The psyker did not look back, and Garro could not blame him. He could not imagine what horrors one gifted with warp-sight would see in this place of desolation and misery.

He nodded. ‘Aye. I’ll bring him.’ Garro turned to seek out his new charge, but Varren held out a hand to stop him.

‘He could have cut you down where you stood,’ said the World Eater. ‘You took a great risk to save him from himself.’

‘I had no choice. You were right. We have lost enough of our brethren to this war.’

As Garro walked away, Varren called out to him. ‘It isn’t over yet, Nathaniel.’

‘Loken. Time to go.’

He found the Luna Wolf standing at the lip of another sinkhole, staring down into the fathomless abyss, and for a moment Garro was afraid the younger warrior might be considering an end by his own hand. ‘Where?’ he asked, at length.

‘To Terra,’ he told him. ‘And the future.’

Loken looked away, finding Garro. ‘Why did you come for me? I was dead. Forgotten. Why bring me back?’

‘You duty is not ended, my friend,’ he said. ‘In truth, it has been renewed and transformed, for all of us. I know only the edges of what the scheme will be, but I trust in it.’ Garro hesitated. The words seemed hollow. Was he trying to convince his kinsman or himself? He pressed on. ‘You are the last, Loken. The final recruit the Sigillite bade me seek out.’

‘For what purpose?’

I do not know. He almost said the words aloud, and it took a near-physical effort to hold them back. Finally, he went to the truth, as he always did, to guide him. ‘The answer to that, we will learn together, brother.’ He offered his hand, in the old gesture of friendship and fealty. ‘The true trial begins for us this day.’

‘No, Garro,’ said Loken. ‘The truth is, it has never ended.’