In the past, he’d imagined his death more often than he cared to admit – wondering if it would come in the distant cold of a deep-void battle, or the burning warmth of a blade to the back.
Despite their vaunted immortality, despite the invulnerability bred into their bones, a primarch was still a being of flesh and blood. One of Angron’s snorted witticisms came back to him in those moments Lorgar mused over mortality: if something bled, it could be killed.
Everything bleeds, Lorgar.His brother’s words, cutting right to the quick even years after they were first uttered. Tanks bled fuel and coolant. Aliens bled blood and ooze. Angron had never stood upon a battlefield and failed to apply his own brand of tortured logic to the conflict.
Lorgar hauled back against the drag, succeeding in doing nothing beyond pulling the coiled lash tighter. The daemon’s clumsy, shattered hand reached for his torso, and the primarch’s kick crunched into its thumb, mangling it further.
With a roar, it lifted him from the ground. In the time it took to spit a curse, the beast snapped its jaws on his free arm, cracked incisors scraping across the ceramite. Melted brass droplets dripped from the creature’s bleeding gums.
He was not used to pain – at least not physical agony. The pressure constricting his arm was incomparable to anything else he’d experienced. Ceramite split in metallic rips, threatening the sealed integrity of his armour plating. Something in his elbow clicked, then crunched, then snapped entirely. The fist at the end of his arm fell loose, the fingers relaxing, no longer obeying his mind’s impulses.
With a fury even his brother Angron would have admired, the primarch wrenched his crozius free with a final scream. The hammer head crashed against the bloodthirster’s temple in a cacophony of breaking bone, shattering its cheek, eye socket, and the hinge of its jaw. The grip relaxed immediately, dropping the primarch to the sand.
He landed hard, heaping more abuse on his ruined arm, but kept a grip on his power maul. With a roll through the beast’s stampeding hooves, Lorgar struck the creature’s other leg, smacking a blow right against the thing’s kneecap. This time, the crack of splitting bone was enough to cause him to wince even through his own pain.
The bloodthirster howled as it fell, crippled, to the sand. Worthless legs stretched out behind it. Before the wings could even beat twice, Lorgar vaulted its back, boots clinging tight to the leathery flesh, and pummelled a single strike to its ridged spine. Another tectonic crackle heralded the daemon’s backbone giving way for good. One wing ceased its ignoble flapping, slapping against the sand and twitching with spasms.
The primarch hammered its club-hands aside as they reached back, deforming the fingers beyond use. Only then did he move around to face it once more, meeting its fevered, bleeding eyes. The blood running from its maw was already cooling in the sand, fusing its jaw to the ground.
A nasty smile coloured his lips. ‘What did you learn from this?’ he asked the creature.
It snuffed at him, almost dumbly bestial but for the enraged sentience drowning in its eyes. Even crippled and broken, it sought to drag itself forward, as if the primarch’s very life was some intolerable insult.
‘Rage without focus is no weapon at all.’ Lorgar raised his crozius. ‘Take this lesson back to the Blood God.’
For the second time, his hammer fell, butchering the incarnated essence of a god.
TEN
ORACLE
THIRTEEN SECONDS LATER, Lorgar collapsed alone.
He didn’t feel the crozius fall from his nerveless fingers. He didn’t feel anything but the breath sawing in and out of his abused body. On instinct, he dragged his broken bones closer, curling upon the sand in foetal echo of the time he spent gestating in his genetic life-pod.
He could taste blood. His own blood. How different it was from the chemical-thick piss running through a Legionary’s veins, or the molten, sick richness of the dead daemon.
The air is too thin.In his heavy-eyed delirium, his own thoughts came in Ingethel’s voice. And my lungs are pierced by spears of rib.
For a time he lay there, struggling to stay alive, breathing blood-wet air into weak lungs.
The daemon died with the same maddening dissolution of so many aetheric insanities in this haunted realm. As for Ingethel, the primarch had no idea. He would check soon. Not yet. Soon. He… he had to…
‘No more tests, Anathema’s son,’ said a voice.
‘One last test, Anathema’s son,’ said another, similar to the first, but somehow flawed. It was as if a botched cloning had lightly scarred the voice’s timbre.
The primarch hauled himself over, blinking bloody eyes up at another winged figure. This one was grotesquely avian, with stinking, withered wings and two vulture’s heads. While it would have towered above a mortal man, it was a hunched and decrepit thing by the standards of its daemon kin, closer in size to Ingethel.
‘I am the one sent to judge you,’ both heads said at once.
‘I am tired of being judged.’ The primarch lay on the sand and laughed, though he couldn’t think what was funny.
‘I bring the chance for a final truth,’ said one of the creature’s heads, in a corvidian caw.
‘I bring the final lie you will hear,’ its second head croaked, just as sincere as the first. No shade of amusement shone in any of the four pebble-black eyes.
‘I am done with this,’ the primarch grunted. Even rising to his feet was a trial. He could feel his bones sliding awkwardly together, jagged pieces of a puzzle that no longer fit cleanly. ‘That,’ he breathed, ‘is most unpleasant.’
‘Lorgar,’ said the creature’s right head.
‘Aurelian,’ said the left.
He didn’t answer them. Limping, he moved to retrieve his crozius from the sand. Its active power field had scorched the ground to black glass. When he lifted it, it had never felt so heavy.
‘Ingethel,’ Lorgar sighed. ‘I am done with this. I have learned all I need to learn. I am returning to my ship.’
There was no answer. Ingethel was nowhere to be seen. The bland desertscape offered no hope of determining direction.
He turned back to the two-headed creature.
‘Leave me be, lest I destroy you as I destroyed the Unbound.’
Both wizened heads bobbed in acknowledgement. ‘If you could banish the Unbound,’ the first said, ‘you could easily banish me, as well.’
‘Or perhaps I am more than I appear to be,’ the second hissed. ‘Perhaps you are weaker now and you would fall before my sorcery.’
Lorgar shook his head, seeking to tame his swimming senses. The air was so painfully thin, it made all thought difficult.
‘I bring you a choice, Lorgar,’ both heads spoke at once, sharing the same serious, watery-eyed expression.
He limped over to his overturned helm, lifting it from the ground and shaking sand from its interior. Both eye lenses were cracked.
‘Speak then.’
The daemon fluttered its wings. Vestigial, skinny things – Lorgar doubted the creature could even fly. Small wonder that it squatted on the sand, leaning upon its bone staff as a crutch.
‘I am Kairos,’ both heads said at once. ‘The mortal realm will come to know me by another name. Fateweaver.’
Lorgar’s desire to show respect for the gods’ agents had faded somewhat in the last hour. The words came through gritted teeth.
‘Get on with it.’
‘The future is not entirely unwritten,’ both heads spoke again. Their wrinkled features were strained by effort, as if speaking with unity was a great challenge. ‘Confluences exist as sureties. There will come a time when war breaks out across the Imperium of Man, and you will once again face the brother you despise.’