The First Heretic

Always, he’d bitten back his psychic potential, hiding it and hating it in equal measure. It was unreliable, erratic, unstable and painful. It was never the gift it seemed to be for Magnus, and thus, he had swallowed it back, walling it up behind unyielding resolve.

No more. A scream of release tore itself free, not from his mouth, but his mind. It echoed across the battlefield. It echoed into the void. Energy sparked from his armour, and a sixth sense unrestrained at last, with its purity perhaps coloured by Chaos, exhaled from his core. A sound like the crashing of tides in the Sea of Souls swept through the ravine, and Lorgar felt the heat of his own fury made manifest. He felt his unchained power reaching out, not only to enhance his physical form, but reaching to his sons across the battlefield.

And there he stood at the heart of the killing fields, winged and haloed by amorphous contrails of psychic fire, shouting his brother’s name into the storm.

Corax answered with a shriek of his own – the call of the betrayer, the cry of the betrayed – and the raven met the heretic in a clash of crozius and claw.

This, came the voice, is the cry of the gods we have both been waiting for.

Argel Tal had no hope of replying. The pain knifing through every cell in his body was enough that he sought to slay himself, clawing at his helm and throat, feeling his fingers burning with his own blood as he ripped hunks armour from his flesh, and fistfuls of flesh from his bones.

Do not fight the communion.

Again, he ignored the voice. He wasn’t dying, no matter how he tried. A hooked claw tore the skin from his throat, and with it, half of his collarbone. He inflicted similar injuries upon himself with each second, but he wasn’t dying. He scrabbled at the armour and bone shielding his two hearts, feverish in his need to wrench both of them from his chest.

Communion... Ascension...

The winged shadow vanished from Argel Tal’s vision, and above him the sky was brightened by the last rays of the setting sun.

I am alive, he thought, even as he tore himself apart, even as he ripped a handful of steaming organ meat from his shattered ribcage and burst his first heart in his hand. I did not die beneath the shadow, and I cannot destroy myself now.

This pain will bleed you of sanity. Let me ascend!

Despite agony no living being had ever survived, there was still a moment of fierce resistance in the war behind Argel Tal’s eyes. He wanted to die, to taste nothingness, not to endure further corruption. The sentience that was Raum found itself shackled deeper within by a soul ruthlessly unwilling to surrender.

I will save us, not harm us. RELEASE ME.

The Word Bearer’s concentration went slack, not because he believed the daemon’s words, but from reaching the absolute end of his strength.

Argel Tal closed his eyes.

Raum opened them.

A cloven hoof of bleached bone, wreathed in ceramite that seemed moulded to fit, crushed a gasping Raven Guard warrior into the mud. Great claws with too many joints, resembling the lashing branches of winter trees, closed and opened, closed and opened, while each of its long fingers ended in black talons. Most of the crimson armour was bulked up and layered by dense bone ridges and knuckly spines. It stood taller than even an Astartes – though not equal to the primarchs battling a short distance away.

Its helm was crowned in pagan majesty with great horns of ivory, and silhouetted against the bright cannon fire it seemed to resemble the Taur of Minos from pre-Imperial Terran mythology. Its legs were jointed backwards and brutally muscled beneath the armour, with powerful black hooves leaving burning imprints in the soil. Its Astartes helm was split along the cheeks and mouth grille to reveal a shark’s maw with rows of bladed teeth, glinting with clear acidic saliva.

The daemon drew in a great breath and roared it back out into the retreating ranks of the Raven Guard. That terrible wall of sound hit the Astartes as if an earthquake was laughing at them. Dozens fell to their hands and knees.

Around the warped helm’s left eye lens, the golden sun was all that marked the creature as the man it had been.

TWENTY-SEVEN

An Image to Make his Name

Sacrifice

The Burden of Truth

Ishaq made a jump for it, and rolled under the bulkhead before it slammed down. It was less daring than it sounded as the security doors were taking their sweet time to close, but with the sirens wailing and the emergency lighting darkening everything to deep red, he was hardly thinking clearly. He didn’t want to get sucked out of a void breach, but nor did he want to be caught up here when the battle was over. He needed to go, go, go.

Checking his picter was still in one piece, he broke into another sprint, desperate to get the hell off this deck. The labyrinthine corridors defied this, hindering him further by the fact most of the wall markings were in Colchisian rather than Imperial Gothic.

Have I been here before? One corridor was much the same as another. In the distance, he could hear bulkheads sealing shut and corridors collapsing as the ship sustained more damage. He’d already made it through several thoroughfares where the walls were reduced to wreckage scattered all over the floor in a twisted mess of grey steel and black iron.

He started running again. Four dead men waited around the next corner – four Euchar soldiers, half-crushed by an exploded, fallen wall.

No. Three dead. ‘Help me,’ said the fourth.