The First Heretic

‘Speak, Erebus.’

‘You always taught us to speak the truth, even if our voices shake.’

Lorgar raised his head, a smile creasing the corners of his split lips as he met the Chaplain’s solemn eyes. ‘And have we done that?’

There was no hesitation. ‘The Emperor is a god,’ said Erebus. ‘We’ve taken the truth to the stars, and seeded it across the Imperium. We should feel no shame for how we acted. You should feel no shame for it, sire.’

The primarch wiped the back his hand across his forehead, brushing aside a streak of ash to reveal the gold beneath. Since leaving Khur less than a week before, Lorgar smeared dust from Monarchia’s surface over his features with each new day. His kohl-ringed eyes were darkened further by exhaustion and narrowed by the burden of shame, but this single gesture was the closest either warrior had seen to their primarch cleaning himself since his humiliation before the Emperor.

‘It all began on Colchis,’ he said. ‘And we have been in error since then. My visions of the Emperor’s arrival. The battles of the Last War. It all began with the belief that divinity deserved worship, purely because it was divine.’ He laughed without humour. ‘Even now, I ache to think of the faith we destroyed to make room for our beliefs.’

‘Sire,’ Erebus leaned closer, his eyes rapt upon his primarch’s. ‘We stand on the precipice of destruction. The Legion... its faith is shattered. The Chaplains remain stoic, but they are beset by warriors who come to them with doubts. And with you lost to us, with no guiding light, those who carry the crozius have no answers to give those in grey.’

Lorgar blinked, flecks of ash from his eyelashes dusting down to his lap.

‘I have no answers to offer the Chaplains,’ he said.

‘Perhaps that is so,’ allowed Erebus, ‘but you are still too mired in regret. “Draw inspiration from the past. Use it to shape the future. Do not let it strangle you with shame”.’

Lorgar snorted, though there was no malice in the sound. ‘You quote my own writings back to me, Erebus?’

‘They hold true,’ said the Chaplain.

‘You dwell on thoughts of Colchis,’ Kor Phaeron’s eyes glinted with reflected candlelight. To Erebus, he looked desperate on some subtle, secret level. A kind of insatiable, unfeedable, hunger brightened the elder’s eyes, eating at him from within. Most undignified. ‘If there is something you wish to speak of, my son...’ Kor Phaeron’s thin hand fell upon Lorgar’s golden, whip-scarred shoulder, ‘...then speak of it.’

The primarch looked to his oldest ally, with the cadaverous stare that forever lingered on the man’s face. Yet Lorgar saw beyond it, in a way few others ever could, seeing the kindness, the care.

The paternal love for an aggrieved son.

Lorgar smiled with genuine warmth for the first time in three days, and rested his tattooed hand over his foster father’s weaker, too-human fingers.

‘Do you remember the Emperor’s arrival? The exultation in our hearts, that we were proved right? Do you recall the savage vindication after six years of righteous war?’

The older man nodded. ‘I do.’

The young man with the golden skin drops to one knee, silver tears sparkling on his flawless features like droplets of sacred oil.

‘I knew you’d come,’ he weeps the words. ‘I knew you’d come.’

The God in Gold offers his armoured hand to the kneeling young man. ‘I am the Emperor,’ he smiles, benevolence incarnate, glory radiating from him in a palpable aura that hurts the eyes of every onlooker. Thousands of people line the streets. Hundreds of priests, clad in the dove-grey of the Covenant’s ecclesiarchs, kneel with Lorgar before the coming of the God-Emperor.

‘I know who you are,’ the golden primarch says through his dignified tears. ‘I have dreamed of you for years, foreseeing this moment. Father, Emperor, my lord... We are the Covenant of Colchis, and we have won this world through your worship, for the glory of your name.’

Lorgar turned to meet Kor Phaeron’s eyes.

‘That morning. As I knelt before the Emperor, with the home world’s holy caste chanting... With the red rock domes of Vharadesh made amber by the rising dawn. Did you see as I saw?’

Kor Phaeron looked away. ‘You will not like the answer, Lorgar.’

‘I have liked nothing of late, yet I still wish to know.’ He laughed suddenly, softly. ‘Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes.’

‘I saw a god in golden armour,’ Kor Phaeron said. ‘The very image of you, but aged in ways I couldn’t grasp. I never saw the figure as a benevolent one. His psychic presence pained my eyes, and he smelled of bloodshed, domination, and the many worlds already burned to ash in his wake. Even then, I feared we’d waged six years of war in error, butchering a true faith to replace it with a false one. In his eyes – eyes so like yours – I saw the promise of avarice, the hunger of greed. Everyone else saw nothing but hope. Even you... So I thought, perhaps, I had seen wrong. I trusted your heart, Lorgar. Not my own.’

Lorgar nodded, his contemplative eyes turning away again. Erebus listened in silence, for rare were the moments that any Word Bearer received insight into the primarch’s life before the Legion.

‘Of all the Emperor’s sons,’ Kor Phaeron said, ‘you are the one that most resembles your father in face and form. But you could never commit acts of cruelty and destruction while wearing a smile. The others, your brothers, can do this. They take after the Emperor in that way, where you do not.’

Lorgar lowered his gaze.

‘Even Magnus?’ he asked.