'Are you going to stand there wasting bullets on me, or are you going to fight an enemy worth fighting?'
The inquisitor stared at Sarpedon and paused for what seemed like forever. Sarpedon could see the tendons in his hand and neck tensing as he prepared for the next move - to attack or flee, to demand Sarpedon's surrender or to negotiate for his own safety.
Before the inquisitor could act a Shockwave tore across the battlefield, tearing from the traitor leader's landing site through the wreckage and barricades. Sarpedon turned and saw showers of earth and shattered metal fountaining as something powerful and fast hurtled straight towards him, carving a furrow through the battlefield, throwing traitors and Marines alike into the air as it passed.
Sarpedon dived to one side as a wall of flying debris ripped over him, covering his legs with deep slash marks down to the muscle and knocking the inquisitor flying. Sarpedon hit the ground hard and rolled quickly, planting his leg under him to spring up and face whatever new monstrosity had sent itself against the Soul Drinkers.
Metal and soil fell like rain. In the centre of the destruction, in a zone of calm like the eye of a hurricane, was Teturact.
No descriptions existed of Teturact but Sarpedon knew straight away who he was facing. Sarpedon could feel his augmented organs straining to keep diseases from erupting throughout his body at the enemy's mere presence. Strange sounds rolled just beneath his range of hearing, the taste of rank blood filled his mouth. His autosenses could barely contain the sight in front of him.
Teturact was a thin, wizened humanoid form perched like a malevolent carrion bird on the shoulders of four immense, brawny brute-mutants. The faces of the mutants were swamped with muscle until their features hardly showed, and their trunk-like arms ended in fists as large as a man's torso. Teturact probably couldn't walk on his own, but even in that deformed, dried-out body Sarpedon could taste the vastness of Teturact's mind and the immense power it could bring to bear.
Teturact reached out and Sarpedon was held in a psychic vice that reached through his armour and began to crush his solid bone ribcage as it hauled him high into the air. A white wall of pain crushed inwards as he struggled against bonds that only existed in Teturact's mind. The battlefield whirled underneath him and Sarpedon could see the facility, the isolated pockets of Soul Drinkers holding back the tide, the vast swarms of traitors wading through the volleys of bolter fire and the piles of their own dead. He saw the snarled knots of slaughter where Tellos and Iktinos were engaged in savage hand-to-hand fighting on opposite sides of the battlefield. He could even pick out, through a whitening gauze of agony, the battle on the edge of his vision where black-armoured Sisters and Hereticus storm troopers were fighting tides of zombies and wizards whose corrupt magic Sarpedon could taste.
Sarpedon's ribcage fractured. A warm wave rode through him as internal organs ruptured and his insides were flooded with blood. He tried to reach through Teturact's grip deep into his own mind, to dredge out the power of the Hell that might distract Teturact long enough for Sarpedon to strike back. But Teturact was powerful, more powerful than anything Sarpedon had felt before, a vessel of pure hatred and corruption focused through an utterly malevolent mind.
With a flick of his will, Teturact threw Sarpedon down to the ground. Somehow, Sarpedon forced his legs underneath him and spread them enough to cushion his landing, otherwise his armour would have been cracked clean open by the impact. As it was he felt the muscles tearing in their armour of chitin and his single bionic leg shorted out with a flash of pain.
Teturact lifted him up again, legs dangling uselessly, and brought Sarpedon through the air towards him. Sarpedon saw Teturact's ruin of a face, flaps of ragged skin for features, weeping raw pits for eyes.
'You are different.’ said Teturact's voice in Sarpedon's head, thick and treacly, like acid corroding his brain. 'My worshippers have faced the Astartes many times, but they tasted pure and misguided. You are tainted. You are like I once was, a man flawed down to the genes. Ah, but I took those flaws and made them my reason for being. You are afraid of them, however. You want to turn yourself back. How can you turn back when you are already so much more than a man?'
Teturact drew Sarpedon closer. It felt like his mind was on fire.
'If you could only see what is possible when your own body is no longer a prison, then you would really know what freedom is. That is what you want, isn't it, flawed man? To be free? Yet you search to rebuild the prisons of your flesh.'
Sarpedon knew he couldn't take Teturact on, not when the vast fortress of the mutant's mind stood before him and Sarpedon himself was, ultimately, little more than a man. But Sarpedon could taste somewhere in Teturact a single weakness, the same weakness that was killing the Imperium and which the Soul Drinkers themselves had possessed until Sarpedon had shown them the way out.
It was arrogance. Teturact believed he was a god, and his victims were worshippers. When he looked at the Soul Drinkers he saw more fodder for his worship, strong and skilled men but men nonetheless. Sarpedon was not much more than a man but he was more, and what set him apart was the strength of will that had seen him fight against his Chapter and his Imperium, accepting the hatred of the universe in return for a fleeting taste of freedom.
A white stab of psychic power was driving forth from Teturact's mind, boring into Sarpedon's own mind the same way it had done to untold billions of desperate plague victims, to plant in him the seeds of worship and bind him to Teturact's will. Sarpedon let him in, pulling back his psychic defences just enough to let Teturact think he was winning.
Cold horror washed through Sarpedon. He could feel the exultation of a god and the billions of minds united in worship. He could see a universe where stars were weeping sores and planets teemed with life like spores of a disease, all singing the name of Teturact. He could feel the Imperium he hated crushed beneath the weight of worship, the minds of its citizens liberated even as their bodies decayed and the armies of the Emperor died in their trillions...
Sarpedon opened his eyes. He could swear he detected rapture in that near-featureless face, the face of a god being fed the worship he craved.
With a strength he didn't know he had, Sarpedon snapped his mind away from Teturact, the images of glorious decay receding with impossible speed and leaving him dazed and near-blind with the effort. But Teturact was stunned, too, his mind losing its grip on Sarpedon and dropping him to the ground. Sarpedon landed hard on his back, exhaust gases hissing from the fractured power plant in his armour's backpack.
He fumbled with numb fingers for his boltgun. His hands shook as he brought it to bear on the indistinct shapes towering over him, and his trigger finger spasmed as he willed it to pull down on the trigger.
Half a magazine of bolts sprayed out. Every one ricocheted off an invisible shield of will, space warping where they hit.
The brute-mutants leaned down and Teturact leaned with them, his spindly form tottering directly over Sarpedon.
Traitor! it screeched into his head. I am a god, you are vermin! Vermin! And you deny me, believer of nothing? I will give you something to believe!
A red spear of psychic hatred shot down and held Sarpedon to the ground like an insect pinned to a board. Spite poured into him, hot and livid, the rage of a god denied. Just once it had been denied, once in its lifetime, and its response was to annihilate the mind that denied it in a tide of hatred.
Sarpedon was strong, stronger than a man, stronger than even any Marine. That meant he would survive a split second more before his mind gave way and his body became just another shell in service of Teturact the God. The last thing he would see would be the ruined mutant face, those bleeding eye-holes narrowed in hate. It gave him a strange satisfaction, in those last moments, that he could force even that unreadable face to give away its emotions.