Lorgar bared his teeth behind the granite-grey faceplate. ‘I am armoured to survive such extremes. What are you, to stand here and ignore an atmosphere cold enough to turn blood to ice in the time it takes the human heart to beat a single pulse?’
This is where the realm of flesh and spirit meet. Physical laws mean nothing here. There is no limit on what might be. That is Chaos. Endless possibility.
Lorgar took a deep breath of the clean, recyc-scrubbed air of his war plate. It tasted of ritual cleansing oils, coppery in his sinuses. ‘So I could breathe here? I would not freeze?’
You are unique among the Anathema’s sons. All of your brothers are whole, Lorgar. You alone are lost. They have mastered their gifts since birth. Your own mastery will come with understanding. When it does, you will have the strength to reshape entire worlds on a whim.
Lorgar shook his head. ‘I am bred from the best of humanity, but I am still human. You may stand unarmoured in this storm. It would destroy me in a moment. We are too different.’
The creature faced the primarch, its swollen eye cataracted by a film of red grit. Only one difference exists between the warp and the flesh. In the realm of flesh, sentient life is born ensouled. In the realm of raw thought, all life is soulless. But both are alive. The Born and the Neverborn, on both sides of reality. Destined for symbiosis. Destined for union.
The primarch crouched, letting dust fall through his gauntleted fingers. ‘Neverborn. I have studied the history of my species, Ingethel. That is no more than a poetic word for ‘‘daemon’’.’
The creature turned its back to the wind again, but said nothing.
‘What is this world called?’ Lorgar looked up, but did not rise. The dust hissed away in the racing wind, leaving his fingers in a gritty stream.
The eldar called it ‘‘Ycressa’’ before the Fall. After the birth of Slaa Neth, She Who Thirsts, it was named ‘‘Shanriatha’’.
The primarch gave a soft laugh.
You know the meaning of this word?
‘I learned the eldar tongue when my Legion first met them. Yes, I know the meaning of the word. It means ‘‘never forgotten’’.’
The daemon flicked a slit tongue over its maw, heedless of the bloody scratches it inflicted upon itself. You have met the soul-broken?
‘The soulbroken?’
The eldar.
Lorgar rose to his feet, brushing the last of the dust away. ‘The Imperium has encountered them many times. Some expeditionary fleets have clashed with them, to drive them from Imperial space. Others have passed in peace. My brother Magnus was always one of the more lenient when encountering them.’ He hesitated for a moment, turning to the creature. ‘Your kind know of my brother Magnus, do they not?’
The gods themselves know Magnus, Lorgar. His name is threaded through destiny’s web as often as your own.
The Word Bearer looked back to the horizon. ‘That gives me little comfort.’
It will, in time. Speak of the soulbroken.
He continued, slower now. ‘My Legion encountered them not long after we sailed from Colchis the very first time. A fleet of elder, their vessels built of bone, drifting through the void powered by immense solar sails. I met with their farseers, to determine their place in Mankind’s galaxy. During those weeks, I mastered their tongue.’
Lorgar took another breath, thinking back to that time. ‘It was easy to despise them. Their inhumanity made them cold; their skin stank of bitter oil and alien sweat, and their vaunted wisdom came at the cost of sneering condescension. What right did a dying breed have to judge us inferior? I asked them this, and they had no answer.’
He laughed again, the same gentle sound. ‘They named us mon-keigh, their term for so-called ‘‘lesser races’’. And yet, while they were easy to hate, there was much to admire in them, as well. Their existence is a tragic one.’
And what of your Legion?
‘We destroyed them,’ the primarch admitted. ‘At great cost, in both warships and loyal lives. They care for nothing but survival, the ferocious need to continue their existence saturates their whole culture. None of them ever die easily, nor do they fall cleanly.’
He paused for a moment. ‘Why do you name them ‘‘soul-broken’’?’
If such a thing as Ingethel could be said to smile, it did so now. You know what this place is. Not this world, but this whole region of space, where gods and mortals meet. A goddess was born here. Slaa Neth. She Who Thirsts.
Lorgar looked to the sky, watching the cosmic afterbirth raging above. He knew without being told that this storm would rage forever. And it would spread, over the coming centuries, engulfing ever more solar systems. It would spread far and wide, opening to peer into the galaxy’s core like a god’s staring eye.
‘I am listening,’ he said quietly.
In her genesis, brought about by the eldar’s worship, she claimed the spirits of the entire race. They are the soulbroken. When any mortal dies, its spirit drifts into the warp. It is the way of things. But when the eldar die, they are pulled right into the maw of the goddess they betrayed. She thirsts for them, for they are her children. She drinks them as they die.
Together, the daemon and the Emperor’s son began to move west. Lorgar moved against the wind, his helmed head lowered as he listened to the creature’s psychic speech. Ingethel closed its eyes as best as its deformed face allowed, its slithering passage leaving a sidewinder trail in the dust.
The marks they left didn’t last long, for the storm soon obliterated all evidence of their passing.
‘Something you said, it matches the Old Ways of Colchis.’ He quoted verbatim from the texts of the very religion he’d once overthrown in the name of Emperor-worship. ‘It is said that ‘‘upon death, the unshackled soul drifts into the infinite, to be judged by thirsting gods’’.’
Ingethel made a choking, coughing gargle. It took Lorgar a moment to realise the creature was laughing.
It is the core of a million human faiths throughout your species’ lifespan. The Primordial Truth is in humanity’s blood. You all reach for it. You all know that something awaits after death. The faithful, the loyal, will be judged kindly and reside in their gods’ domains. The faithless, the unbelievers, will drift through the aether, serving as prey for the Neverborn. The warp is the end of all spirits. It is the destination of every soul.
‘That is hardly the Heaven promised in most human faiths,’ Lorgar felt his lip curling.
No. But it is the same hell your species has always feared.
The primarch couldn’t argue with that.
You wish to see the ruins of this world,Ingethel weaved as it slithered alongside him.
‘This was once a grand city.’ Lorgar could make out the first fallen towers on the horizon, shrouded in generations of carmine dust. Whatever tectonic devastation had claimed this world long ago dragged the city into a crater, spilling its spires to the ground. What protruded from the earth now resembled the ribcage of some long-dead beast.
These ruins were never a true city. When the soulbroken fled the goddess’s birth, the survivors boarded vast domed platforms of living bone, carrying the remnants of their species into the stars on a final exodus.
‘Craftworlds. I have seen one,’ Lorgar kept trudging forward, into the wind. ‘It was magnificent, in its own alien, chilling way.’
Ingethel’s chittery laugh wasn’t quite stolen by the wind. Many of the fledgling craftworlds failed to escape Slaa Neth’s birth scream. They dissolved in the void, or fell to die on the faces of these abandoned worlds.