Lorgar breathed deeply, tasting more of the ash on the wind.
He said nothing, for there was little to say. Argel Tal had brought these words back with him, and now they were Lorgar’s to hear firsthand.
Chaos seeks symbiosis with life: the Ensouled and the Neverborn in natural harmony. Union. Faith. Power, Lorgar. Immortality and endless possibility. Sensations beyond mortal comprehension. The ability to feel maddening delight at any agony. The gift of ecstasy even when you are destroyed, making even death a great joke, knowing you will incarnate in another form over and over until the suns themselves go black.
And when the stars die, Chaos still lives on in the cold – still perfect, still exultant, still pure. This is everything humanity has ever dreamed of – to be unchallenged in the galaxy, to be omnipotent above all other life, and to be eternal.
Lorgar would no longer look at the fallen city. ‘You have chosen poorly. I am pleased and proud to have discovered the truth. I am honoured to be chosen by beings powerful enough to be considered divine by the truest meaning of the word. But I will struggle to bring this light to humanity. I cannot win a war against the god sat upon the Terran Throne.’
Life is struggle. You will strive, and you will succeed.
‘Even if I believed all of this…’ Lorgar’s blood ran cold. ‘I have one hundred thousand warriors. We will be dead the moment we make planetfall upon the Throneworld.’
You will attract more, as you liberate world after world. It is written in the stars; after you sail from here, your Legion no longer spends years crafting perfect worlds venerating the Anathema as the God-Emperor. You will crush resistance beneath your boots, and draw fresh, faithful humans into your service. Some will be slaves in the bowels of your warships. Others will be your flock, to shepherd them toward enlightenment. Many more will be taken into your genetic harvester asylums, and bred into Legionaries.
The primarch resisted the urge to curse. ‘I am growing increasingly uneasy with you discussing my future in such definite terms. None of these events have happened yet and may never occur. You have still not answered the one question that matters. Why must it be me?’
It has to be you.
His teeth clenched together, hard enough to squeak. ‘Why? Why not one of the others? Horus? Sanguinius? The Lion? Dorn?’
Each of the other Legions would die for their primarchs, and lay down their lives for the Imperium. But the Imperium is the cancer killing the species. Even when some of your brothers turn against the Emperor, they will fight to command the Imperium. Only the Word Bearers will die for the truth, and for humanity itself.
Faith and steel must now be joined. If humanity becomes an empire instead of a species, it will fall to alien claws and the wrath of the gods. It is the way of things. What has happened before will happen again.
Lorgar pulled a sealed scroll from his belt, unrolling it with exaggerated care. Red dust clung to the parchment from the surface of Shanriatha, as did a few speckles of blood from carnage beneath the Eternity Gate. They dotted the cream page, bold against the pale paper, almost like tiny wax seals.
His son’s blood. The lifeblood of one of his Legion, fifty years from now. A warrior destined to die on the home world of humanity, countless systems away from where he’d been born. Had that warrior even been born, yet?
Lorgar screwed up the parchment, destroying the Colchisian cuneiform scripture, and let it fall to the cold ground.
‘Is Magnus here now? Are we here, fifty years from the night I entered the Great Eye?’
Yes. Where we stand now is mere days after something humanity will come to recall as the Razing of Prospero. Magnus fell victim to his own arrogance, and now resides in the tallest tower of his broken city here, lamenting the destruction of his Legion and the death of his hopes. He intended only the best, but his curiosity saw him damned in the eyes of the Emperor. He looked too deep, too long, into ideals the Emperor did not hold.
Lorgar nodded, expecting nothing less. It was hardly unprecedented, after all. His own Legion – a hundred thousand Word Bearers kneeling in the dust of Monarchia…
He shook his head, looking back to the city, and the tower at the heart of it.
‘Why does he come here, to the empyrean?’
To hide where the Emperor’s dogs cannot catch him. He is here to lick his wounds. For his sins, Magnus was sentenced to censure. He chose exile over execution.
Lorgar started walking.
‘I am going to speak with him.’
You will not be allowed to stand before the Crimson King.
He didn’t need to turn to know the daemon was smiling. ‘We will see,’ he called over his shoulder.
There was no answer. Ingethel was gone.
HE WAS THREATENED by an abortion wearing the cardinal red ceramite of the Thousand Sons Legion.
‘Denlcrrgh yidzun,’ it demanded. A bronze bolter was wrapped in the quivering flesh-coloured tentacles it used as arms. Behind this lone sentry, the fallen city wall of Tizca rose in mounds of rubble.
Lorgar breathed a slow exhalation. Even from a dozen metres away, the Thousand Son reeked of spoiled meat and the rich, coppery tang of aetheric secrets. What remained of its face looked as if it’d melted down the front of its skull.
‘I am Lorgar, Lord of the Seventeenth Legion.’ He gestured to the bolter in the thing’s limbs. ‘Lower your weapon, nephew. I am here to speak with my brother.’
Another attempt at speech left the Thousand Son’s ravaged features as a meaningless blur of syllables. It seemed to recognise its own inadequacy in this regard, for a gentle, cultured voice drifted into Lorgar’s mind a moment later.
I am Hazjihn of the Fifteenth Legion. You cannot be what you appear.
Lorgar buried his discomfort beneath his father’s smile. ‘I could say the same words to you, Hazjihn.’ The ground gave a particularly violent shudder. Glass shattered in the lowest levels of the closest pyramid as more rocks tumbled from the ruined city wall.
The Crimson King tells us we are the only human life on this world. Hazjihn’s dripping face snuffed back a mouthful of air in ungainly respiration. You cannot be Lord Aurelian of the Word Bearers.
Lorgar spread his hands in a display of unarmed beneficence. ‘You know me, Hazjihn. Do you recall the evening I lectured on the Khed-Qahir Parables, in the west garden district of the City of Grey Flowers?’
The bolter lowered a fraction. I recall it well. How many of my Legion’s warriors were present that night?
Lorgar nodded in respect to the Thousand Son. ‘Thirty-seven, among a mortal crowd of over twenty thousand.’
The warrior’s sloping eyes blinked slowly. And what is the fiftieth principle of Qahir?
‘There is no fiftieth principle of Qahir, for he died of a consumptive sickness soon after penning the nineteenth. The fiftieth principle of Khed is to maintain cleanliness of flesh and iron as surely as one would maintain purity of soul, for the external inexorably bleeds into the internal.’
The warrior lowered his bolter. You may yet be a deceiver, but I will take you to my lord. He will judge you with his own eye.
Lorgar inclined his head again, this time in thanks. He followed the limping figure of Hazjihn, ascending the mounds of rubble to enter the city proper. The warrior’s halting stride set his armour’s servo joints snarling.