‘I knew you’d come,’ he weeps the words. ‘I knew you’d come.’
The God in Gold offers his armoured hand to the kneeling young man. ‘I am the Emperor,’ he smiles, benevolence incarnate, glory radiating from him in a palpable aura that hurts the eyes of every onlooker. Thousands of people line the streets. Hundreds of priests, clad in the dove-grey of the Covenant’s ecclesiarchs, kneel with Lorgar before the coming of the God-Emperor.
‘I know who you are,’ the golden primarch says through his dignified tears. ‘I have dreamed of you for years, foreseeing this moment. Father, Emperor, my lord... We are the Covenant of Colchis, and we have won this world through your worship, for the glory of your name.’
Lorgar turned to meet Kor Phaeron’s eyes.
‘That morning. As I knelt before the Emperor, with the home world’s holy caste chanting... With the red rock domes of Vharadesh made amber by the rising dawn. Did you see as I saw?’
Kor Phaeron looked away. ‘You will not like the answer, Lorgar.’
‘I have liked nothing of late, yet I still wish to know.’ He laughed suddenly, softly. ‘Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes.’
‘I saw a god in golden armour,’ Kor Phaeron said. ‘The very image of you, but aged in ways I couldn’t grasp. I never saw the figure as a benevolent one. His psychic presence pained my eyes, and he smelled of bloodshed, domination, and the many worlds already burned to ash in his wake. Even then, I feared we’d waged six years of war in error, butchering a true faith to replace it with a false one. In his eyes – eyes so like yours – I saw the promise of avarice, the hunger of greed. Everyone else saw nothing but hope. Even you... So I thought, perhaps, I had seen wrong. I trusted your heart, Lorgar. Not my own.’
Lorgar nodded, his contemplative eyes turning away again. Erebus listened in silence, for rare were the moments that any Word Bearer received insight into the primarch’s life before the Legion.
‘Of all the Emperor’s sons,’ Kor Phaeron said, ‘you are the one that most resembles your father in face and form. But you could never commit acts of cruelty and destruction while wearing a smile. The others, your brothers, can do this. They take after the Emperor in that way, where you do not.’
Lorgar lowered his gaze.
‘Even Magnus?’ he asked.
A giant stands with the Emperor – a figure robed in the azure of off-world oceans. One eye stares down at the kneeling figure. The other eye is lost, a scarred crater marking its lack.
‘Greetings, Lorgar,’ says the muscled giant. He is taller even than the God in Gold, and his long hair is styled in a scarlet mane, like that of a prideland lion. ‘I am Magnus. Your brother.’
‘Even Magnus.’ Kor Phaeron seemed reluctant to admit it. His features remained tense. ‘Though I respect him greatly, there is a deep cruelty, born of impatience, threaded through his core. I saw it in his face that day, and each meeting since.’
Lorgar looked down at his hands, ash-stained with crescent moons of blood beneath the fingernails.
‘We are all our father’s sons,’ he said.
‘You are all facets of the Emperor,’ Kor Phaeron amended. ‘You are aspects pulled from a genetic primer. The Lion is your father’s rationality – his analytical skill – unburdened by conscience. Magnus is his psychic potential and eager mind, unrestrained by patience. Russ is his ferocity, untempered by reason. Even Horus...’
‘Go on,’ Lorgar said, looking up now. ‘What of Horus?’
‘The Emperor’s ambition, unshaped by humility. Think of all the worlds where our Legion waged war alongside the Luna Wolves. You’ve seen it as well as I have. Horus hides his arrogance, but it is there – a layer beneath his skin, a shroud around his soul. Pride beats through his body like blood.’
‘And Guilliman?’ Lorgar let his hands rest on his knees again. A smile inched across his features.
‘Guilliman.’ Kor Phaeron’s narrow lips moulded into a grimace, opposing his primarch’s smirk. ‘Guilliman is your father’s echo, heart and soul. If all else went wrong, he would be heir to the empire. Horus is the brightest star and you carry your father’s face, but Guilliman’s heart and soul are cast in the Emperor’s image.’
Lorgar nodded, still smiling to see his advisor’s bitterness. ‘My Macraggian brother is as easy to read as an open book,’ he said. ‘But what of me, Kor Phaeron? Surely I bear more than my father’s features. What aspect of the Imperial avatar have I inherited?’
‘Sire?’ interrupted Erebus. ‘If I may?’
Lorgar granted permission with a tilt of his head. Ever the statesman, Erebus needed no time to compose himself, or his answer.
‘You embody the Emperor’s hope. You are his belief in a greater way of life, and his desire to raise humanity to achieve its greatest potential. You devote yourself to these ends, forever selfless, utterly faithful, striving for the betterment of all.’
Amusement gleamed in the primarch’s eyes – eyes so like the Emperor’s own.
‘Poetic, but indulgent, Erebus. What of my failings? If I am not proud like Horus Lupercal, nor impatient like Magnus the Red... What will history say of Lorgar Aurelian?’
Erebus’s solemn facade cracked. A moment of doubt flashed across his features, and he glanced to Kor Phaeron. The gesture drew a whispered chuckle from their primarch.
‘You are both conspirators,’ he laughed, the sound soft. ‘Do not fear my wrath. I am enjoying this game. It is enlightening. So enlighten me, this last time.’
‘Sire,’ Kor Phaeron began, but Lorgar silenced him, reaching to touch his foster father’s hand as it rested upon his shoulder.
‘No. You know better than that, Kor. I am not “sire”. Never to you.’
‘History will say that if the Seventeenth Primarch had one weakness, it was his faith in others. His selfless devotion and unbreakable loyalty caused him grief beyond the capacity of a mortal heart to contain. He trusted too easily, and too deeply.’
Lorgar said nothing for several moments, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. His shoulders rose and fell with his quiet breaths, the whip-welts inflamed and angry, burning with the faint sheen of sweat dusting his body. Fresher brand marks burnt into the flesh of his back were scabbing over now.
At last, he spoke, his eyes narrowed to slits.
‘My father was wrong about me. I am not a general like my brothers. And I refuse that destiny. I will not blindly walk the same paths they already tread. I will never understand tactics and logistics with the effortless ease of Guilliman or the Lion. I will never possess the skill with a blade shown by Fulgrim or the Khan. Am I diminished because I recognise my faults? I do not believe so.’
He looked down at his hands once more. Fine-fingered, barely callused, the hands of an artist or a poet. His mace – the black iron crozius arcanum – was as much a sceptre of office as it was a weapon.
‘Is that so wrong?’ he asked his closest advisors. ‘Is it so wrong of me to walk the ways of a visionary, a seeker, rather than a simple soldier? What is it within my father that renders him so thirsty for blood? Why is destruction the answer to every question he is asked?’
Kor Phaeron clutched Lorgar’s shoulder tighter. ‘Because, my son, he is gravely flawed. He is an imperfect god.’
The primarch met his foster father’s eyes in the chamber’s gloom, the glance sharp and cold. ‘Do not say what you are about to say.’
‘Lorgar...’ Kor Phaeron tried, but the primarch’s glare silenced him. His eyes were sharp with a plea, not with fury.
‘Do not say it,’ whispered Lorgar. ‘Do not say we tore our home world apart all those years ago in the name of false worship. I cannot live with that. It is one thing for the Emperor to spit on all we have achieved as a Legion, but this is different. Can you piss upon the Covenant and the peaceful Colchis we created after six years of civil war? Will you name my father a false god?’