THE HORUS HERESY

It is a time of legend.

Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Mankind conquer the stars in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races are to be smashed by his elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons. Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor, as system after system is brought back under his control. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful champions.

First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superhuman beings who have led the Space Marine Legions in campaign after campaign. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation, while the Space Marines themselves are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

Many are the tales told of these legendary beings. From the halls of the Imperial Palace on Terra to the outermost reaches of Ultima Segmentum, their deeds are known to be shaping the very future of the galaxy. But can such souls remain free of doubt and corruption forever? Or will the temptation of greater power prove too much for even the most loyal sons of the Emperor?

The seeds of heresy have already been sown, and the start of the greatest war in the history of mankind is but a few years away...

TERMINUS

Chris Wraight

Caipha Morarg knelt, his knees sinking into Terra’s dark earth. His fists hit the soil. He vomited.

He was wearing his helm, the old Mk II one, and it filled up quickly. Once, that wouldn’t have been a problem. The filters would have snapped open, keeping his airways clear and siphoning it all off. But now the filters were clogged, and he felt his nostrils and mouth fill up, and his eyes blur with mucus and acid.

He gasped for air, and reached for the seal at his neck. It wouldn’t open. The catch had rusted shut three days ago and he hadn’t been able to prise it clear since.

He should have been drowning by then, but he wasn’t. He should have been gagging uncontrollably, but the reflex stopped firing. He swallowed. He opened his eyes. He felt lumpy matter swill around him, and somehow he didn’t need to breathe, or swallow, or see.

He calmed down. A kind of vision returned to him, clouded now in green. He saw his own hands claw through the mulch below him. He saw the dust of Terra, turned black by munitions and chem run-off, flaking over the finger-plates of his gauntlet.

A boot intruded on the picture. Morarg looked up, and blearily saw Zadal Crosius standing over him. The Apothecary cumbersomely got down on his knees alongside him.

‘What ails you, brother?’ he asked.

Morarg laughed, coughing up more bile. ‘What does not?’

Crosius didn’t laugh. It was probably harder on him, all of this. The Apothecaries of the Death Guard had been renowned, back at the start. They had presided over the warriors that could absorb all poisons, carry on fighting even when the tox-clouds rolled across the trenches. They had been skilled with their own poisons, too – the ones that cured, that invaded the bloodstream and did battle at the cellular level. Now, what was left for them? They would have to find something else to do to justify a place in the Legion. There were no cures left, not when everything, absolutely everything, was a sickness.

Morarg shifted painfully onto his side, reclining into the thick mud. It was good, for just a moment, to let his aching joints rest.

‘How can I be purging again?’ he asked, sourly. ‘Haven’t eaten for days.’

None of them had. The stores on all the warships were rotten. None of them seemed to need to eat. Surely they would have to, at some stage.

Crosius took out a wrench, reached for a tap-valve at Morarg’s throat, and managed to twist it open. The vomitus drained away, staining an already filthy breastplate with another stripe of brown-grey.

‘You’re still asking questions,’ Crosius said. ‘That’s good. Not many still ask questions.’

‘Maybe they’re wise.’

Crosius scanned him with a blotch-lensed auspex. ‘I dislike the lassitude. It’s worse than everything else. We were never incurious.’

He rose. Morarg managed to get to his feet, too, somewhat awkwardly. The servos down the right-hand side of his armour were jammed, meaning he had to haul the weight of his armour using his body. That made him much slower than he had been, but then again his body was changing too, and who knew where that process would end up? Maybe his speed would return. Or maybe it would be traded for something more useful. He reached for his blade – a gladius with a blunted edge, glistening with a film of chems. The taste of his own stomach acid fizzed on his chapped lips.

Ahead of him ran the trench-plains, the mass of interlocked kill-zones created by the defenders of the Throneworld. The landscape was drear, clouded by fogs, pocked with ruined guntowers and wrecked war machines. The walls of the Palace itself could be glimpsed as a high grey screen in the far distance. They looked like a continental shelf, or a geological fault. They were still a long, long way off.

All around him, stretching out in a ragged line, other Death Guard were advancing, grey shadows in the fog, trudging slowly, one step at a time. The march was eerily quiet – the suck of boots in the muck, the wheeze of respiratory systems, the grind of corroded armour-joints. Every so often a weapon would discharge with a flare of plasma or a swoosh of phosphex. Rigid taxonomies were breaking down, and warriors used what they felt like using. Some of those guns had bulbous new additions, pulsing like lung-sacs. Some looked ready to fall apart.

Ahead of them was an isolated defence tower, thrusting out of the toxin-swamp like the prow of a ship, blackened by repeated impacts but still operational. The sector defenders had fallen back there – the remnants of three or four broken infantry battalions from overrun trench systems. The place really should be levelled, though the prospect filled Morarg with weariness. He could just sink into the mud. Rest for a while.

Crosius was already moving, though, hoisting a snub-nosed cannon of some kind onto his shoulder, where it nestled amid decaying needle-thickets and extractor-nests.

‘Work to do, brother,’ the Apothecary said.

Morarg followed him.

‘As always,’ he said, sourly.

It was hard to remember how it had all happened. Morarg had no idea how long they had been stranded in the warp before breaking into attack range of Terra. It could have been a lifetime. It might have been longer.

Everything was a struggle to pin down. He felt strangely ancient, and yet the change had happened just before the fleet had crashed back into realspace. In truth he was still all new, remade, fresh christened at the font of decay.

Only snatches and fragments of the transformation remained. He could remember a long period where he had been lucid, crouched against the floor of a long snaking corridor aboard the Terminus Est, watching the flies boil out of the broken atmosphere-seals. He had tried to crawl away from them, clunking heavily down the passage with his armour denting the floor panels. They had got in despite that, squirming and flocking, filling his air-intakes, wriggling against his flesh. He had screamed, and they had poured down his throat, making him gag and gag again.

How had that struggle ended? He didn’t remember. He didn’t even know if it had happened just like that. There had been many bad dreams, crazy dreams, locked in those narrow tubes and gantries, strung out for hours, days, months, years. The ships had all been like tombs, hanging immobile in the warp, their protective canopies compromised, their innards ringing with screams, or dreams of them, or visions of dreams.

Now he looked up again. The defence tower was within shot range, but he didn’t take up a gun. He still had his blade in his hand, and that would do. He could see targets, greasy blurs on his inner visor scanner – a collection of ragged Imperial squads, cut off by the previous offensive, trying to get back to the tower. They were on foot, jogging and limping. Morarg saw that they wore a mix of uniforms and armour plates. Some were well armed, hauling heavy weapons that were still functioning properly. Others looked little more than beggars. These were the remnants of older actions, the scraps left over from greater offensives. Every horizon was alight with furious conflicts, making the earth tremble and buck, but here, in this place, it was half-empty, the haunt of the slow and the out-of-place, a mist-shrouded hinterland of dreamlike residues. They would have to march for a long time before they encountered the infernos of combat they had been promised.

Crosius had gone ahead of him. He saw the Apothecary fire his shoulder-mounted cannon. A puff of brown-green swirled out, and a shell of some sort smacked right into the middle of the retreating band of defenders. It exploded with a wet slap, splattering a dozen of them with a luminous film. They all started shrieking at once, clawing at their helms. A few others, further out from the blast radius, turned to fire back, sending streams of las-fire and solid rounds into Crosius. The Apothecary just soaked it all up, still lumbering studiously, getting ready to fire again.

Even before the change, Crosius would not have been seriously inconvenienced by such warriors, but he would have at least made some attempt to evade the shots, or to respond to them with a greater level of aggression. He would have charged at them, perhaps, getting into blade range without the need to waste a shell. Now he just walked as if in a daze, cloaked in his new absorbent skin of mottled ceramite-and-flesh.

‘Can we still feel it?’ Morarg asked himself, looking down at his own grime-encrusted hands. ‘Can I still stir my blood?’

Then he looked up at the tower. It was a solid thing, an ugly thing, built of rockcrete blocks around a metal core. Las-fire spat from its upper parapet in concentrations that might conceivably do some damage. A few hundred defenders had made it there. The wretches fleeing from Crosius might add to their number if they weren’t cut down in the open. They must have known they were all going to die in that place, cut off from the main retreat, isolated out in the wastes.

Were they despairing yet? Were they ready to make their own pacts with whatever powers they believed in, to stave off annihilation?

That thought made him strangely angry. But that was good. He started to swing the blade around him, lubricating the joints of his armour, trying to get some feeling back.

The tower loomed ahead. The Death Guard were closing in now, advancing slowly in ones and twos, no tactical formations, coming from all directions.

‘Get ready,’ Morarg grunted, swinging the blade. ‘Get ready.’

Afterwards, he and Crosius sat in what had been a watch-station right at the summit of the defence tower. The windows were all smashed, the instruments destroyed. They sat next to one another with their backs against the wall. Crosius had taken an instrument from his backpack – something thin and spidery – and was turning it over and over in his palm. Morarg had laid his blade on his knees. It was coated in fresh blood now, much of which ran in sticky rivulets down his armour.

A head, newly relieved of its accompanying body, faced them. It was a human female’s, still with the helmet on, grimy cheeks visible under a smeared visor. Beyond that were other body parts, some half-encased in armour plates, some like sides of rotting meat. It already smelled bad.

Morarg looked at the head.

‘When did you last see him?’ he asked.

‘Who?’ said Crosius.

‘The primarch.’

The Apothecary thought for a moment. ‘A long time ago.’

Morarg’s own last memory of Mortarion was on the bridge of the Endurance, a few days back. The primarch had been slumped in his command throne, surrounded by a fog of chemical gases so thick that his outline was almost entirely obscured. Morarg had seen those great new wings, though, like webs of dirty gauze, spread up and out, bent under the throne canopy.

‘He made the choice,’ Morarg said, morosely.

‘That is his burden.’

‘So where were you, when you realised?’

‘Realised?’

‘That he had made it. For all of us.’

Crosius thought about it. The needles in the device made a snicking sound as something retracted, and that briefly distracted him. ‘I don’t remember. The Terminus Est? I think so. We all went over, didn’t we? When Typhon–’

‘Don’t say his name.’

‘Calas. Is that better? When he… I was there, I think. It smelled different, even before.’ Crosius’ head angled back slowly, coming to rest against the rockcrete. ‘I saw the primarch, there, in the middle of it all, from a distance. He was coming up from the lower decks. I was sick. We were all sick. I couldn’t do anything for myself, couldn’t do anything for anyone else. I followed him, I wanted to talk. I thought maybe I might be able to… but it was all gone, by then.’

‘He wouldn’t have wanted anything from you.’

‘No, but I wasn’t thinking. None of us were.’ Crosius exhaled, and a fine grey mist slid out of his helm grille. ‘I caught his face, for a moment, though the lights were going on and off. So I saw him in bits. In snatches. At times, it seemed he was laughing. At times, screaming. I called out. I said this was a warp trick. We needed to dig deeper. Would he issue a command? Would he tell me what to do? I would do anything. We were all willing to die, if that was the command.’

Morarg listened. ‘What did he say?’

‘I don’t know if he heard me. There was this… howling. All the time. I think it might have been howling for weeks. You remember how it was. The howling, in the ships, that made you think your mind had gone.’

Morarg did not. The ship had never howled for him. Instead, it had been the flies, in his eyes, in his stomach, buzzing, biting.

‘But then he did see me, and I saw him, and he was already changing, and I knew then that he’d done something. It was the way he looked. Like nothing I’d ever seen before. He’d been angry. He’d been morose. Hells, I’d seen him in pain, just for a moment.’

Morarg looked at the head. It was beginning to tilt over in its pool of blood. ‘So what was it?’

‘I don’t know. It was like he’d just realised something. Something that had been wearing at him for years, and now he understood it. He wasn’t shocked. He wasn’t surprised.’ Crosius thought about it. ‘There was only one other time I saw an expression like that. Back during the Akasta Compliance. I was treating a battle-brother for a spinal injury, long-term, that had hampered his combat. He’d given himself thirty per cent increased load-drills, trying to punish it out. He’d only come to see me under orders. We found the problem. It wasn’t his spine. He’d taken shot-damage to the jacks under his carapace, so the problem was the armour. When I told him, I saw that same expression. Now he understood. Now he realised why all that effort hadn’t improved it. It never would have. All wasted effort, but now he could get it fixed.’ Crosius’ fingers returned to the needle-array, moving unconsciously. ‘He wasn’t happy. You couldn’t be happy, having done all that for nothing. So it wasn’t even relief. It was like…’

The Apothecary trailed off.

Morarg didn’t say anything for a while. Talking was harder work than it had been before. He got phlegm in the back of his throat, and he could never clear it.

‘I’ll ask you something now,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll ask you it once, and I’ll never ask it again.’

Crosius turned to face him, and listened.

‘Did he make the right decision?’

No reply came.

‘What I mean is,’ Morarg said, now the words were out, with more on the way, ‘that was what we lived for. No one endures more than we do. I don’t even remember how long it lasted. It must have been a trick. Witchery. Could we have outlasted it?’ He shook his head. ‘Look at me. I don’t know what kind of bargain he made. I’m not sure we came out on the right side of it.’

Crosius laughed. At least, it might have been a laugh. ‘No? You never had much imagination, brother.’ He held up the needle-array. ‘I take hits now, and I barely feel them. I don’t need to eat. I don’t need to sleep. My mind works better. Before, I was a crass butcher. I’d take out progenoids, staple up bolt-wounds. Wasting my time. Now, though. Now, I have ideas.’

The Apothecary shuffled forward, stowing the array, and got to his feet. The whole process took three times as long as it once did, with every movement ponderous and effort-laden.

‘You’re right,’ Crosius said. ‘Never ask that again. You and me, we both knew him on Barbarus. We were both on that ship. He never gave an order that wasn’t the right one. He is who he is.’

Then he lumbered off. As he went, his boot crushed the disembodied head, crunching the helm as if it were made of porcelain.

Morarg watched him go.

‘Then why isn’t he here?’ he asked, out loud. ‘Why are we on this world, when he is not?’

From the tower, the Death Guard went north, heading towards the first line of walls proper. No orders came in from the fleet in orbit. In the past, the orders would have been sent in advance, meticulously prepared, all eventualities covered. The ingress routes would all have been plotted, the milestones charted, responsibilities assigned. The Legion was not known for tactical flexibility, but it had always had a reputation for thoroughness.

Now, though, the ships in orbit were silent. Those warriors who had been landed made their own way, operating on only the vaguest instructions. They knew the destination, and they knew the likely levels of resistance, but everything in between was a blur.

It didn’t matter. They marched like automata, getting used to the way their bodies functioned now, feeling the gravitational pull of this world that, for most of them, was alien territory.

Perhaps that was the idea. Let them discover themselves. Flex new muscles against slime and filth, before the true test – fighting once again against Legiones Astartes.

Morarg trudged through the stink. He fought when he had to, which was only when some desperate band of defenders burst from the cover of bombed-out habs to try to take him down. The landscape around him had once been a cityscape, filled with inhabited spires the rival to anything in the wider Imperium. Now it was a horizontal land of rubble heaps and spike-ruins, overwatched by a bile-black sky and rocked by the constant rumble of munitions. The northern horizon took the place of a sun, and was constantly alight, making all shadows run southwards. Just occasionally, in the aftermath of some colossal flash, you could even see the profile of the Palace itself, monumental and unmoving, a leviathan splayed across the far arch of the world, yet to be approached, let alone breached.

The closer he got, the heavier his tread became. Morarg began to imagine a great dome of heat-wash, trembling ahead of him, pushing him back. It was as if something, or someone, knew just what had been done to them, what turgid presences now fizzed through their clotted veins, and repelled it all.

He never slept. Sleep was for another age, one in which his armour had come cleanly away from the plugs in his body. He dreamed, though – a waking reverie, with his eyes open. He saw the rulers of old Barbarus stalking ahead of him, milk-pale in the mists, grinning as they had once done when they were masters.

Throwing them down had been the great achievement. After they were killed, it had felt, briefly, as if there were no tyrants left, and no suffering, and only open skies.

And for that, you would follow him. You would ignore the tics, the preoccupations, the lapses. You knew that he had suffered too, thrown into a world that was not his own, and tortured, and made to doubt. You would see that he had retained the core of himself, and had triumphed. And, later, you would see that he received no credit for that from the empire he had become a part of. He was scorned, despite all he had done. And that scorn pulled the Legion together, and made them tight as a clenched gauntlet, so that every insult was remembered and nursed, and every scrap of strength was gathered and kept lean for the purpose of restoring the ledgers.

Morarg had no doubt that other Legions admired their primarchs. He had no doubt that they fought well for them, anxious to win praise or avoid disgrace. But he knew this, too – that few loved their liege lord as they did. For an outsider to the Death Guard, they were a morose band of grime-streaked plodders, despised even by their allies. For an insider, they were merely as the universe had made them. They were hard steel, alloyed fast, tempered in the furnaces of disdain. The rust was only a surface illusion, or had been, something to hide their power and make an enemy underestimate them.

‘Death Guard,’ an outsider, an Ultramarine, had once said to Morarg during an uneasy joint campaign. ‘I think, sometimes, that is an unhealthy name.’

Morarg had not attempted to justify it to him. If he had done so, he might have said that a son of Macragge could know nothing of death, not truly, being raised on worlds of preservation and order. If he had been surrounded by it from birth, made aware of it as a part of existence, as common as water or a heartbeat, he would understand. The Legion did not celebrate death, but nor did they guard against it, or try to hold it back. Even before the great change, they had held it in their arms, feeling its cold breath mingling with theirs, cloaking themselves in its white shadow.

He looked up then, roused from his thoughts. A few hundred metres away, another great bastion loomed out of the condensate, rearing high. Its crown was intact, studded with fixed cannons. Faint red lights blinked on and off across dark flanks. An aquila had been carved over its high lintel, as black as the stone around it.

Morarg paused. This place would not so easily be laid low. The Death Guard came to a halt, strung out thinly, tiny specks against the upcoming fortress.

He looked down at his blade. He held it up into the weak light, and saw the angry glow of the horizon-burn reflect against its cutting edge.

Except that the horizon was not the source of the light. The light was flooding down from up above, fiery, refracting and churning like water. The dust at his feet stirred, whipped up by suddenly churning air. The oily water sitting at the base of the blast craters chopped and slapped. From somewhere ahead – perhaps the bastion itself – a warning klaxon started to bray.

Morarg looked up. The racing clouds broke open. Shafts of pale illumination lanced through them, spearing down to the blackened earth. A lander broke through, shadowed by hovering Stormbirds. It was huge, steaming and flame-flickered from its orbital passage, underpinned with an array of heavy thrusters that now blasted hard to arrest its descent.

Morarg lumbered backwards, slipping as he did so, trying to put as much distance as he could between himself and that thing. Lightning crackled around it as it came down, dancing across beaten-metal panels bearing the Death Guard sigil. Even as it came to touch down, he could see the deep-soaked damage across every part of it – the rust, the blown rivets, the cracks. None of that could have been caused by weapons. The lander was changing all by itself, just as they all were changing.

Eventually the fires coughed out, and the whole contraption smacked heavily to earth, its extended legs sinking a metre-deep into the mud. A gang-ramp extended and lowered. Pale gas vented, tumbling out of grilles and tube-mouths, cascading down a long shallow slope.

From the aperture, less than twenty metres from where Morarg stood, eight figures emerged. Seven of them were giants, their armour encrusted with filth so thick that it formed an ablative curtain all of its own. They carried reaper-blades, iron-bound heels clanging as they descended.

The eighth was the master, and he was colossal. He had grown obscenely, stretched, as if pulled by a god’s eager fingers, his bones cracking and his grey skin tearing. His face was hidden behind a rebreather, his eyes shadowed by a tattered cowl. His huge moth-wings unfurled as he emerged, too big to be missed, too flimsy to carry him aloft, surely. Were they affectations? Were they curses?

He came down the ramp, limping, supporting himself on the stave of his scythe. Morarg watched him come. All the Death Guard watched him come. They were silent. Some would not have laid eyes on him since the great change itself. Even Morarg, one of those who had been close to him in counsel for a long time, had not seen him properly since then, only through veils and shadows.

Now the primarch was out in the open again, lit by the weak sun of his birthworld. He looked too tall, too extended, a scarecrow in motley armour, held together by rotting strips of linen, or maybe sorcery, or maybe just his will.

Mortarion, Lord of Death, reached the end of the ramp. His cloven boots sank into the broken ground. As they touched it, the mud dried up, split open, and tendrils of dark growth shot up and entwined over his boots before desiccating, freezing and dying. The air curdled, and the stench of sulphur wafted across an already pungent landscape of varied stinks.

The primarch paused. Then, slowly, he lowered himself to his knees. He extended a claw and gathered up a clod of earth. He kneaded it for a moment, then pressed it to his rebreather, as if he wanted to taste it, or inhale its aroma, or perhaps just feel it against his withered skin.

Then he rose. The movements were cumbersome, slow, as if made underwater, accompanied by the squeals and creaks of his ramshackle armour.

Morarg walked up to him warily. He didn’t know why, really, only that it had been a long time, and an equerry ought to be beside his lord.

Mortarion let him come. The Deathshroud fell back.

‘I wished to taste it,’ the primarch said, in a voice that was like the rattle of wind over grave-chimes. ‘But of course, it has changed. We have all of us changed.’

Morarg came to a halt before his primarch, craning his neck to look up at his face. ‘My hearts are gladdened to see you again, lord.’

Mortarion’s face creased under the cowl, as if a dry smile disfigured the features, or a grimace. ‘I would have come sooner. My father has made this place poison for me. Perhaps the only poison that could affect me now. Still, I am used to that.’ He looked out, looked up, his gaze falling on the bastion ahead. Now, suddenly, the place did not look quite so impressive. ‘And He weakens now. Little by little, His power erodes. We shall squeeze Him, eh? We shall squeeze the last of that cold blood from Him.’

Morarg didn’t understand. His mind seemed more sluggish than it had once been. Or perhaps it was just different – able to grasp some things more surely, apt to lose its grip on others. His confusion must have been obvious, for Mortarion didn’t move off, or take up his scythe, but remained where he was, standing ankle deep in the rotting vegetation his presence had conjured.

‘You are not what you were, Caipha,’ Mortarion said. ‘You were once a wretch on a toxic world. I made you something else. Then my father made you something else again. And now an older power intervenes, and you are altered a third time. Are you still the same person? You have the same name. That may be what binds us back to the source. Our names. Our signifiers. Everything else – the blades, the flesh, the powers – they do not persist.’

He drew closer to Morarg, towering over him, shedding new and fouler stenches with every movement. ‘I am become what I hated. I am become without end, without beginning. I am become unnatural. I cannot cross His boundary. I offend against His sense of… hygiene.’

The next word came to Morarg’s lips too easily, as if summoned by a spell. ‘Daemon.’

‘It brings gifts with it,’ Mortarion agreed. ‘I see where His mind walks, now. I see His nature, burning like a flame in the void. I even understand some of the things He did.’ A hoarse laugh. ‘Too late, now, of course.’

‘And yet… is it?’ Morarg’s voice was edged with desperation. ‘You could take us back, could you not? If you willed it?’

The primarch didn’t seem to hear the question. Or perhaps it did not deserve an answer.

‘I spent my life looking for the ends of things,’ he said, softly, speaking to himself. ‘I wished for an end to suffering. I wished for an end to the desires that plagued me. Then I wished for an end to this rotten empire, and thought that was my last challenge. Whenever I got what I wished for, I saw another end ahead of me, something else to accomplish. But then, on Calas’ damned ship, I made the final choice, and erased the very idea. There is the paradox – I spoke the word, and from that moment, I had always done it. I had always been like this. I have memories from a time before I was born. I have memories from events that have yet to take place. I see the world of the senses like a rumpled cloak spread out before me, and I struggle to hold on to its hem.’

And then Morarg understood. There was no going back. It was not just impossible – it made no sense now. There was no back.

‘Then…’ he started, uncertainly, feeling the sicknesses boil within him, feeling his muscles atrophy, ‘what is to be done now?’

Mortarion drew himself up to his full height. He extended his claw, and the soil of Terra fell from its outstretched talons.

The air thickened. The sound of buzzing intensified, and it became markedly hotter. A rumble ran along the landscape, opening up fissures that gaped and popped.

Morarg felt a bitter taste at the back of his throat, a ringing in his ears, and found himself wanting to scrabble away. He recognised the tang of it from the Terminus Est, the same forces that had run rampant across those disease-crammed decks.

His gaze followed the direction of the primarch’s arm, just in time to see the terrain around the distant bastion erupt. The land under it rebelled, bursting apart amid clouds of frenzied buzzing. Huge cracks leapt up the outer walls, from which black-green foliage spilled like entrails. More alarms went off, pathetic against the gathering thunder of breaking earth. An explosion rang out, releasing bursts of green-tinged lightning, then another. A watchtower collapsed in a pall of rubble-dust, and the great aquila snapped in two. It was as if a thousand years of degradation had been accelerated into a few moments, running rampant in a deranged vid-sequence.

The Death Guard assembled there watched in silence. They never said a word. One by one, seeing the devastation unfold, they started to march towards the fortress. As the outer walls tumbled, they mutely lowered their weapons towards the many breaches. Death, and the promise of death, was calling them again.

Mortarion began to advance with them, keeping his sorcerous grip locked on the bastion the whole time. As he went, the air around him split, bursting and sliding like tallow on glass. His claw tightened, and more adamantium blast-plates folded into spinning debris. The Deathshroud came along with him, revenants of decay, their scythes crackling with black-edged energies.

The aura of ruin was a sham. Morarg watched the whole time, and saw the power coiled up within that decrepit shell of rags. He realised then what had been bargained for. This was power beyond a dream. This was a power beyond time. This was despair fermented in eternity, the primal ache that would one day smother the stars themselves.

He fell in behind Mortarion, marching in silent lockstep.

‘What is to be done?’ he breathed, swinging his blunt blade in readiness. ‘What we have always done. Endure.’