Erebus and Kor Phaeron – through their patience and guidance – aided me in growing attuned to the call.
My tutors in the Covenant, and my heart’s family now. We meditated, pored over the Covenant’s texts, and we decided the Legion’s destiny.
Something calls me, faint but infinite, prickling my sixth sense like an echo in the stars.
He turns the second card, and sees himself – robed and cowled, turning away so as to avoid his own gaze. A common card, this one. Faith.
Humanity is nothing without faith.
Faith raises us above the soulless and the damned. It is the soul’s fuel, and the driving force behind millennia of mankind’s survival. We are hollow without it. Existence is cold and arbitrary in a godless galaxy – faith shapes us, raises us above all other life, defines us as perfect in our sentience.
In eras where faith was choked, weakness and decay infested the species, withering its innards. That is something the Emperor, beloved by all, has always known, but never admits.
Yet he knows, and he forges his empire accordingly. A god need not be named a god in order to stand in supremacy. Names are meaningless. Supremacy matters – and my father stands ascendant over all mortal life in the galaxy: a god in power, a god in wrath, a god in vision.
A god in all but name.
The Old Faith of Colchis is one that shares roots in thousands of human cultures, across thousands of worlds. That alone is evidence that somewhere within its meandering parables, and the unsubtle blending of myth into history and history into myth, there exists a core of absolute truth.
The loveliest legend is that of the empyrean, the Primordial Truth.
It is known by countless names, of course. The empyrean is the name we spoke on Colchis. Others named it heaven – a means of existing into eternity, long after the death of the mortal form. A realm of infinite possibility: a paradise of potential where the souls of every mortal in history coil around one another.
Even I know such things are myths, stories spoken and passed down imperfectly through countless generations.
But... imagine it. Imagine the reality behind the myths. Imagine a place in the universe where gods and mortals meet. Imagine the miracles of power that could be performed.
Imagine a state of utter chaos, utter purity, where anything is possible. Life ends in death, but existence does not.
If there is truth to the Old Faith, I will find it.
He turns the third card. A haze of heat makes the sky shimmer above a skyline of towers and domes. Colchis. The City of Grey Flowers. Home.
The people of Colchis have always looked to the stars for answers. The Legion born on that world, the Bearers of the Word, is no exception. Many Chapters within the Legion are named for the constellations that brighten the night sky. Even the name they bestowed upon me, the name spoken by no one outside the Legion, has its foundations in antiquity. ‘Aurelian’, they call out as they wage war. ‘The golden’.
Yet its linguistic roots go further back, to a truer meaning, created by those ancestors that forever stared skyward for inspiration.
Aurelian. The sun.
It is natural for us to seek answers in the stars. Life comes from them. The Emperor descended from them. The Legion rose into them.
Fate awaits us beyond them.
Colchisian legends tell tales of primitive space-faring vessels leaving the world in search of the gods, much in the same way the Afrikaharan and Grecianic peoples of Ancient Earth once sought their deities. I have read the fragments that remain of their cultures, and I have walked the ways of the past with my brother Magnus. The travels of Osyrus and Odisseon in Terran myth are the travels of Khaane, Tezen, Slanat and Narag – prophets born of Colchis, great seekers now lost to time’s embrace.
Their journey to seek the home of the gods is known to us as the Pilgrimage.
He turns the fourth card. The psychoreactive liquid forms architectural wonders in his fingertips: an arching bridge, a meandering path of stone through a great garden... A journey. A pilgrimage.
The Pilgrimage is the oldest legend in the Covenant of Colchis, and the one most often seen in human cultures scattered across the galaxy. Humanity has a fundamental need to believe in it. The Primordial Truth: heaven, paradise... It exists somewhere, in some form – home of the gods, underworld of the daemons. The layer behind natural reality. Anything is possible within its boundaries.
The Pilgrimage is nothing less than the journey to see it with one’s own eyes. To confirm where mythology ends and faith begins.
Heaven. Hell. Gods. Daemons.
I will have the answers I seek.
He turns the fifth and final card. The Emperor, bedecked in finery, all details writ with punishing clarity except the one aspect that matters: his face. A golden lord.
I was weaned on the old scrolls – the very scrolls we cast aside in favour of worshipping the Emperor. Now, I cannot help but look back to the teachings of my youth, and think of those legends and their cores of truth.
In crude imagery, the old works showed a stain on the stars – a scar in reality, where the Primordial Truth reached out into the universe of flesh, bone, blood and breath. Each of them foretold of a golden lord, a being of godly power that would carry humanity to divine perfection. It had to be my father. It had to be the Emperor. And I believed it was, until the moment it was not.
He was not the golden lord. The Emperor will carry us to the stars, but never beyond them. My dreams will be lies, if a golden lord does not rise.
I look to the stars now, with the old scrolls burning runes across my memory. And I see my own hands as I write these words.
Erebus and Kor Phaeron speak the truth.
My hands.
They, too, are golden.
Part Two
PILGRIMAGE
Three years after the Legion’s
departure from Colchis
IV
A Child’s Dreams
I can only imagine how the primarch’s heart shattered when the Pilgrimage ended.
Three years of the Seventeenth Legion scattered across the stars. Three years of the Word Bearers sailing farther and faster than any of their brother warriors, reaching into the edges of space and pulling the boundaries of the Imperium with them.
So much of humanity’s dominion over the stars is owed to the sons of Lorgar – a bitter reality after the years of ponderous, meticulous advancement, earning them nothing but scorn.
But I know the temperament of this Legion. For every peaceful compliance – for every culture brought into the Imperium and quietly encouraged to follow the new Word – there will have been a world that now spins in space as a dead husk, fallen victim to the Word Bearers venting their wrath.
The Pilgrimage revealed many truths: the flaws written into the Legion’s precious gene-seed; the arcane gestation of Lorgar Aurelian himself; the existence of the neverborn – named as daemons, spirits and angels by a million ignorant generations of mankind. But the greatest truth revealed was also the hardest to accept, and it broke a primarch’s heart.