‘You’re one of them,’ the human recoiled, her feet betraying her on the uneven rock and sending her down to the dust again. She was younger than Argel Tal had first guessed, but the warrior was poor at estimating human age. Eighteen. Perhaps younger. Certainly no older.
‘I am Captain Argel Tal of the Seventh Assault Company, Serrated Sun Chapter, Seventeenth Legio Astartes.’
‘Seventeenth... You... you are not a false angel?’
‘I came to this world six decades ago,’ the captain said. ‘I was not false then, nor am I now.’
‘You are not a false angel,’ the girl said again. She was clearly hesitant, still not looking directly at the Astartes as she rose on shivering legs. Argel Tal took a step closer, offering his hand. The young woman didn’t take it. She didn’t even acknowledge it.
The warrior’s eye lens displays flickered with crude bio-sign analyses that Argel Tal had no need to see. The female’s condition was obvious from her jutting facial bones, the patches of raw, discoloured skin decorating her body, and her limbs shaking in a manner that had nothing to do with fear.
‘You are on the edge of malnutrition,’ said the captain, ‘and the wounds on your hands and legs are grievously infected.’
This last was an understatement. Given the spread of flesh corruption below the knees, it was a miracle the girl could still walk at all. Amputation was a very real possibility.
‘What colour is your armour, angel?’ she asked. ‘Answer me this question, I beg you.’
The Word Bearer withdrew his offered hand.
‘And you are blind,’ the warrior said. ‘Forgive me for not noticing before.’
‘I saw the city die,’ she said. ‘I saw it burning as flame rained from the stars. The sky-fire stole my eyes on the Day of Judgement.’
‘It’s called flash blindness. Your retinas are bleached by an oversaturation of light. Sight may return in time.’
The young woman let out a panicked yell as Argel Tal rested his gauntleted fingers on her skeletal shoulder. She flinched back, but the Astartes kept her standing, not allowing her to fall.
‘Please don’t kill me.’
‘I will not kill you. I am guiding you to safety. We saved this world sixty years ago, Khurian. We never meant to bring this upon you. What is your name?’
‘Cyrene. But... what colour is your armour, angel? You never answered me.’
Argel Tal looked down into her blinded eyes.
‘Please tell me,’ she repeated.
‘Grey.’
The girl burst into tears, and allowed herself to be half-carried back to the shelter of the Word Bearers gunship.
FIVE
The Old Ways
The Soul’s Fuel
New Eyes
With that fierce breed of arrogance found only in the hearts of the truly ignorant, it was called the Last War.
The Last War – the conflict to end all conflict.
‘I remember it,’ Kor Phaeron murmured. ‘I remember every day and night we fought, while around us, Colchis burned.’
‘Six years,’ Lorgar’s smile was rueful, his eyes cast down to the marble floor of his meditation chamber. ‘Six long, long years of civil war. An entire world torn asunder, in the name of faith.’
Kor Phaeron licked his sharpened incisors. The chamber was lit only by candlelight, and the cloying reek of ashy incense was thick in the air.
‘But we won,’ he said. Seated opposite the primarch, Kor Phaeron wore the grey robe of Colchis’s ruling priest caste. Without his Terminator plate, he was as Lorgar had always known him: an ageing man despite physical enhancement surgery, skeletal of form, fierce of eye.
Lorgar wore nothing but a loincloth of coarse weave, leaving his immense but androgynously slender torso bare. Ritual branding marks, shaped like Colchisian runes, bled freely down his back, while older burn-scars had scabbed over with crusty seals. Fresh weals from the lash striped his shoulders – the overlapping wounds forming a cobweb of self-flagellation.
Erebus sat with his primarch and commander on the floor, wearing the black robe of the Legion’s Chaplains. It was difficult to breathe with Lorgar’s blood in the air. Such a potent, salty scent was almost dizzying. Primarchs did not receive wounds in war. It was a genetic blasphemy for one to bleed.
‘Yes,’ Lorgar said, scratching the stubble marking his jawline. ‘We won. We won and we spread our faith across our home world.’ He moistened his golden lips with a bitten tongue. ‘And look where we find ourselves in the wake of that triumph. A century later, we are the lords of nothing, kings of the only Legion ever to fail my father.’
‘You always taught us, sire–’
‘Speak, Erebus.’
‘You always taught us to speak the truth, even if our voices shake.’
Lorgar raised his head, a smile creasing the corners of his split lips as he met the Chaplain’s solemn eyes. ‘And have we done that?’
There was no hesitation. ‘The Emperor is a god,’ said Erebus. ‘We’ve taken the truth to the stars, and seeded it across the Imperium. We should feel no shame for how we acted. You should feel no shame for it, sire.’
The primarch wiped the back his hand across his forehead, brushing aside a streak of ash to reveal the gold beneath. Since leaving Khur less than a week before, Lorgar smeared dust from Monarchia’s surface over his features with each new day. His kohl-ringed eyes were darkened further by exhaustion and narrowed by the burden of shame, but this single gesture was the closest either warrior had seen to their primarch cleaning himself since his humiliation before the Emperor.
‘It all began on Colchis,’ he said. ‘And we have been in error since then. My visions of the Emperor’s arrival. The battles of the Last War. It all began with the belief that divinity deserved worship, purely because it was divine.’ He laughed without humour. ‘Even now, I ache to think of the faith we destroyed to make room for our beliefs.’
‘Sire,’ Erebus leaned closer, his eyes rapt upon his primarch’s. ‘We stand on the precipice of destruction. The Legion... its faith is shattered. The Chaplains remain stoic, but they are beset by warriors who come to them with doubts. And with you lost to us, with no guiding light, those who carry the crozius have no answers to give those in grey.’
Lorgar blinked, flecks of ash from his eyelashes dusting down to his lap.
‘I have no answers to offer the Chaplains,’ he said.
‘Perhaps that is so,’ allowed Erebus, ‘but you are still too mired in regret. “Draw inspiration from the past. Use it to shape the future. Do not let it strangle you with shame”.’
Lorgar snorted, though there was no malice in the sound. ‘You quote my own writings back to me, Erebus?’
‘They hold true,’ said the Chaplain.
‘You dwell on thoughts of Colchis,’ Kor Phaeron’s eyes glinted with reflected candlelight. To Erebus, he looked desperate on some subtle, secret level. A kind of insatiable, unfeedable, hunger brightened the elder’s eyes, eating at him from within. Most undignified. ‘If there is something you wish to speak of, my son...’ Kor Phaeron’s thin hand fell upon Lorgar’s golden, whip-scarred shoulder, ‘...then speak of it.’
The primarch looked to his oldest ally, with the cadaverous stare that forever lingered on the man’s face. Yet Lorgar saw beyond it, in a way few others ever could, seeing the kindness, the care.
The paternal love for an aggrieved son.
Lorgar smiled with genuine warmth for the first time in three days, and rested his tattooed hand over his foster father’s weaker, too-human fingers.
‘Do you remember the Emperor’s arrival? The exultation in our hearts, that we were proved right? Do you recall the savage vindication after six years of righteous war?’
The older man nodded. ‘I do.’
The young man with the golden skin drops to one knee, silver tears sparkling on his flawless features like droplets of sacred oil.