The daemon licked its maw clean of dark ash and red dust. It ends as it began, Emperor’s son. It ends in war.
TWO WORDS WERE all it took.
‘Show me.’
PART THREE
IN WAR
SIX
THE ULTIMATE GATE
‘I KNOW THIS place,’ he whispered into the silence. ‘This is the Eternity Gate.’
Lorgar stared down the endless hall – wide enough to admit a thousand men marching abreast, long enough to house every banner of honour from each of the Emperor’s regiments. A hundred thousand banners, just in range of his genhanced eyesight. A million reaching beyond it. Two million. Three.
More and more and more, as far as the eye could see, proudly heralding world after world clutched in the Imperium’s grip. Each world raised countless regiments, their war flags hanging here to form an infinite tapestry. The hall itself, stretching for hours upon hours, was part cathedral, part museum, part sanctum of honour.
In the furthest reaches, shadowed by the darkness abounding, stood two wolf-masked Warhound Titans, their city-killing guns trained upon the marble steps leading towards the great gate they guarded.
The portal itself defied description. Words such as ‘‘door’’ and ‘‘gateway’’ implied comprehensible scope, something mortal minds could fathom without difficulty. This was no such thing. To construct such a barricade must have taken a full quarter of the remaining adamantium deposits on Mars, even before the ornate gold was added in layers upon the outer core of dense ceramite plating.
A barrier so grand, so impossible in scale and majesty, could only be protecting the secrets of one soul, above all others. Lorgar had been here but rarely, for the Eternity Gate was the portal to his father’s innermost sanctum, where the Emperor kept his personal genetic laboratory sealed away from his sons and servants.
For a time, Lorgar stood beneath the company banners of an Army regiment hailing from a world called Valhalla. The imagery upon the flags was one of a white world and cloaked men raising pennants in the Emperors service. Lorgar had never set foot upon their world and wondered how far it lay from Terra in the night sky. Perhaps its people were as cold and unwelcoming as the frost upon which they trod.
‘Why did you show me this?’ he asked, turning from the hanging banners.
Ingethel slid from the shadows, the fur around its swollen eye dark and wet with secreted fluids.
‘Are you weeping?’ Lorgar asked the thing.
No. I am bleeding.
‘Why?’
The daemon’s uneven jaws clicked together. It does not matter. Tell me, what do you see in this place?
Lorgar took a breath, tasting the hot and sweat-ripened air of his armour’s internal ventilation. ‘Can I breathe here?’
Yes. We are no longer on Shanriatha.
Lorgar disengaged the seals at his collar and lifted the helm clear. Cold air caressed his face, while his next breath pulled a welcome chill into his burning lungs.
He turned his calm, scholarly eyes upon the daemon. ‘How did we leave the dead world?’
We are there, and we are here. You will understand one night, Lorgar. For now, explanations are a waste of time and breath. Some truths cannot be contained by the mortal mind.
The primarch smiled to hide the curl of his lip. ‘For a guide, you are doing precious little guiding.’
I am an emissary. A viator. Ingethel slithered along the lush red carpet, leaving a slug’s smear. You are here, for all that it matters. You can breathe here, and die here, if we are not careful. The warp is everything and nothing, and you are adrift in its tides.
‘Very well.’ That would do, he supposed, for now.
Do you hear that, Lorgar?
Lorgar took another refreshing breath, letting the chill fill his chest. ‘Battle, in the distance?’ He shook his head. ‘This vision is a lie. The Imperial Palace has never been besieged.’
No? You look upon this endless chamber with mortal eyes. Use an immortal’s sight.
Easier said than done. His sixth sense, never reliable, was a curled core within his mind, suddenly resistant to being unlocked in this place. With concentration, he managed to pry his psychic gift open, as if pulling apart the fingers of a stiffened fist.
Lorgar managed to say ‘I…’ before he was drowned in the battle raging around him.
GHOSTS WAGED WAR in every direction, their spectral bodies falling victim to the bite of each other’s bolters and blades.
The illusion was complete enough to force his body into a physical response – a quickening of the heart, a shallowness of breath, the crucial urge to draw steel and leap into the fray. He considered himself a seeker, a scholar before a soldier, but the battle’s intensity demanded instinctive reaction. Through clenched teeth, Lorgar watched warriors in the clashing shades of Legiones Astartes armour fighting and dying at his feet.
Amongst their chaotic ranks were beings of twisted inhumanity, their wrenched faces and bleeding bodies serving as ironclad evidence of their Neverborn origins. Claws snapped and cleaved; fleshy tendrils of barbed skin lashed and coiled in strangling embrace; eyeless faces howled above the grating clatter of bolters. Thousands upon thousands of warriors, mortal and immortal alike, grinding and slaying, shrieking and roaring. Many bore wings of flame and smoke; while others soared to the high ceiling on chiropteran pinions, casting bats’ shadows on the fighting below. These last daemons hurled the struggling bodies of captured Imperial Fists down, bombarding the warriors below with their own brothers.
Lorgar released a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. In a voiceless exhalation, he said the words, ‘Witness before me, the very heart of heresy.’
Ingethel hunched next to him. A reflection of the tumult showed plain in his swollen eye. Your own words, Emperor’s child?
‘No. A quote, from an old Covenant text.’
Lorgar stared as a towering figure, taller even than a primarch, waded through a broken phalanx of Imperial Fists. The creature was clad in cracked fragments of ceramite armour, warped into a colossal image of Legionary purity. The brutal familiarity of a Mark II snarl-mouthed helm had become a jawed monstrosity, crested by great, curved horns of iron and ivory. Its hands, once human fists in armoured gauntlets, were swollen into gnarled claws ending in scything black barbs, akin to a bird of prey’s talons. Even from this distance, the aberration reeked of something poisonous – a perversely pleasant, cloying malignancy, promising death the moment its sweetness ever touched a tongue. The lethal, deceptive scent poured off the leviathan in waves.
‘That creature,’ Lorgar watched with wide eyes. ‘It wears the armour of the Legions, but I cannot mark its allegiance.’
Ingethel gestured with its two left arms. Do you see the warriors clad in cardinal red?
Lorgar couldn’t fail to see them. An entire Legion unknown to him, their bolters crashing as they advanced in mixed ranks with the bellowing Neverborn. Imperial Fists fell back before them, their numbers diminishing with each passing moment.
They are the Bearers of the Word.
‘They…’
Yes, Lorgar. They are.
And they were. His Legion, his own loyal sons, armoured in a shade of spilled blood and oxidised iron. Prayer scrolls marked their armour, their piety declared with defiance even as the parchments were ripped and scorched in the heat of battle. Many helms bore horns in mimicry of officer crests, and every shoulder guard showed a daemon’s twisted visage, wrought in blackened bronze.