Lorgar watched the warrior’s limping movements. Whatever benefits the mutations offered, they were hidden by the Legion’s armour. Above all, a randomness lay in Hazjin’s corruption. Lorgar couldn’t help contrast it to the shaped, lethal warping of Argel Tal in his previous vision. His own son’s alterations had all the hallmarks of malicious intent, as if a greater intellect had kneaded the Word Bearer’s flesh, rewriting his life at the genetic level, crafting him into a living engine of war.
Hazjihn’s mutation showed no such design. If anything, he seemed diseased.
‘Nephew,’ Lorgar kept his voice soft, ‘what has happened to you? How many of my brother’s sons are as changed as you are?’
Hazjihn didn’t look back. This place, this world, it has altered so many of us. The Powers bless us, my lord.
Blessed. So the daemon Ingethel had spoken the truth: physical considerations faded when one embraced union with the gods. With psychic mastery and the ascension of consciousness to immortal levels, evidently the struggles of the flesh were increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps it made a sick kind of sense: when one was omnipotent, functions of the flesh hardly mattered. Power to such a degree overshadowed lesser concerns.
Yet even for one who prided himself on his enlightened perspective, it was a bitter pill for Lorgar to swallow. The truth may be divine, but that hardly rendered it any more appealing to the human race. Some truths were too ugly to be easily embraced.
A rancid, unwanted smile claimed his mouth for a moment. It would be a crusade, then. Another crusade to bring the truth to the masses at the point of a sword.
Humanity would never, could never, be relied upon to reach its own enlightenment. He found it the sorriest, saddest aspect to the species.
‘How long have you been here, Hazjihn?’
Some of us insist it has been months. Others claim mere days have passed. We cannot record the time accurately, for it flows in all directions. Chronometers dance to tunes of their own devising.The warrior made a strangled gargle, approaching a laugh. However, the primarch tells us mere days have passed in the material realm.
Lorgar.Ingethel’s voice, not Hazjihn’s. Turn back. This future is not yours to see.
The primarch held his tongue as they walked into Tizca, the City of Light.
AS HE LOOKED upon Magnus, Lorgar reconciled logic with emotion, forging both into understanding. This was not the Magnus he knew – this was Magnus five decades older.
In fifty years, he had aged a hundred. The Crimson King had abandoned the pretension of armour, clad now in nothing more than divine light that left aching after-images in the minds of all who looked upon him. Yet beneath the psychic grandeur, a broken brother stared at Lorgar’s arrival. His remaining eye showed little of its former pearlescent gleam and his features, never those of a handsome man, were now cracked by time’s lines and the ravines of tortured thought.
‘Lorgar,’ the figure of Magnus said, breaking the library’s stillness and silence. The witchlight roiling from him in waves illuminated the scrolls and books lining the walls.
The Word Bearer entered slowly, his purring armour joints adding to the breach of silence. Standing too near Magnus bred a painful tingling behind the eyes, as if white noise had evolved into a physical sensation. Lorgar turned his gentle gaze aside, taking in his brother’s collection of writings. Immediately, his glance fell upon one of his own books – An Epilogue to Torment– written the very same year he had won the crusade against the Covenant’s old ways on Colchis.
Lorgar traced a gloved fingertip down the book’s leather spine. ‘You do not seem surprised to see me, brother.’
‘I am not.’ Magnus allowed himself a smile. It only deepened the lines marring his face. ‘This world holds endless surprises. What game is this, I wonder? What incarnated hallucination am I addressing this time? You are a poor simulacrum of Lorgar, spirit. Your eyes do not burn with the fire of a faith only he and his sons understand. Nor do you bear the same scars.’
Magnus remained standing by his writing desk, but made no move to go back to his reading. Lorgar turned to him, narrowing his eyes at the glare.
‘I am no apparition, Magnus. I am Lorgar, your brother, in the final nights of my Pilgrimage. Time, as you see, is mutable, here.’ He hesitated. ‘The years have not been kind to you.’
The other primarch laughed, though the sound held no humour. ‘Recent years have been kind to no one. Begone, creature, and leave me to my calculations.’
‘Brother. It is me.’
Magnus narrowed his remaining eye. ‘I grow weary of this. How did you ascend my tower?’
‘I walked, in the company of your warriors. Magnus, I—’
‘Enough! Leave me to my calculations.’
Lorgar stepped forward, hands raised in brotherly conciliation. ‘Magnus…’
+ Enough. +
The explosion of whiteness stole all sense, save for the feeling of falling.
PART FOUR
CHOSEN OF THE PANTHEON
EIGHT
QUESTIONS
HE OPENED HIS eyes to see a familiar horizon, boiling in rebellion against the laws of nature. Dusk claimed this world, which was surely Shanriatha. Yet he could breathe now. And the temperature, while cold, was far from lethal.
Slowly, Lorgar picked himself up from the sand. The parchment scrolls were gone from his armour, burned away in the face of Magnus’s sorcerous dismissal. A tightness in his lungs didn’t bode well. He felt the muscles in his throat and chest clenching in uncertain spasm.
Not enough oxygen in the air. That was all. He reached for the helm mag-locked to his belt, and resealed his armour. The first breath of his internal air supply was surprisingly soothing. He breathed in the incense of his armour’s sacred oils.
Only then did he see Ingethel. The daemon lay curled upon itself on the ground, a foetal nightmare slick with the slime of gestation. Red sand clotted its moist skin.
He kicked it gently, with the edge of his boot. Ingethel rolled, baring its bestial features to the evening sky. Neither of its eyes could close, but both had made the attempt. They snicked open, and its jaw cracked as it heaved itself from the sand. The moment the daemon righted itself, blood gouted from its maw in a hissing flood. Things writhed in the pool of stinking liquid, squirming into the sand as soon as they came into contact with the air. Lorgar had no desire to examine them any closer.
‘Daemon,’ he said.
Not long now. Soon. This flesh will rot away. I will need to incarnate again. Its bones clicked and cracked as it rose to its slouched height. It cost me much, to pull you from Magnus’s tower.
‘My brother would not speak with me.’
Your brother is a tool of the Changer of the Ways. Are you still so blind, Lorgar? Magnus is a creature unaware of his own ignorance. He is manipulated at every turn, yet believes himself the manipulator. The gods work in many ways. Some of humanity’s leaders must be lured by offers of ambition and dominance, while others must be manipulated until they are ready to witness the truth.
The primarch spoke through clenched teeth. ‘And I?’
You are the chosen of the pantheon. You alone come to Chaos from idealism, for the betterment of the species. In this, as in all things, you are selfless.
Lorgar turned and began walking. The direction was irrelevant, for the desert was a featureless sprawl as far as the eye could see.
Selfless. Magnus had once accused him of the same thing, making it sound more like a critical flaw. Now the daemon used it with a honeyed tongue, as his greatest virtue.