In every battle of his life, he’d felt a desperation beneath the ferocity of the moment. A feverish awareness of how to survive always nestled beneath his righteous anger, even in those moments of near-suicidal attack when he’d led dozens of his brothers against hundreds of the enemy. As his claws ravaged the armour and exposed faces of the Raven Guard around him, he cast that awareness aside.
‘Traitor!’ one of the Raven Guard cried at him. Argel Tal roared in reply, the ceramite of his helm cracking open to reveal a jagged maw, and leapt at the warrior. The Astartes died on the blood-mulched ground, pulled and torn to pieces by Argel Tal’s jointed claws.
He was dimly aware of snarling laughter coming over the vox. At one point, in the senseless, timeless melee, Xaphen had shouted to them all.
‘The Gal Vorbak are released at last!’
‘No,’ Argel Tal replied with growling certainty, without knowing how he knew. ‘Not yet.’
He tore the helm from a Raven Guard’s head and leered into the struggling warrior’s face.
‘Beast...’ the Astartes choked. ‘Corruption...’
Argel Tal caught his reflection in the warrior’s eyes. His black helm roared back at him, the left eye still ringed by a golden sun, the mouth grille split to reveal monstrous jaws of ceramite and bone, the crystal blue eye lenses leaking trails of blood down his painted faceplate.
Argel Tal sank his claws into the warrior’s body, feeling the tingle of leeching blood as his talons scratched at the man’s organs and bones. ‘I am the truth.’
He pulled, and the Raven Guard came apart in his hands, rendered into bloody chunks.
‘No peace among the stars,’ he said, unsure if both of his voices were speaking or if he merely imagined one of them.
‘Only the laughter of thirsting gods.’
The Gal Vorbak howled as one as they cast around for more prey, chasing down the Raven Guard that sought to regroup and oppose the unbelievable treachery facing them. Argel Tal howled loudest of all, but the sound soon died in his throat.
A shadow, the shadow of great wings, eclipsed the sun.
The ground murmured with his landing. Claws slashed from their power-fist housings with silver flashes, and shimmering wings of dark metal reached up from his shoulders into the air above. Slowly, so painfully slowly, he raised his head to the traitors. Black eyes stared from a face whiter than Imperial marble, and written across the pale features was the most consummate, complete anger Argel Tal had ever seen. It was an emotion truer and deeper even than the rage that ruined the faces of the daemons within the warp.
And Argel Tal realised it was not anger, nor rage. It went beyond both. This was wrath, in physical form.
The primarch of the Raven Guard turned with an inhuman cry, letting the thrumming wing-blades affixed to his smoking jetpack slice out with their killing edges. Word Bearers tumbled away in droves, shredded into lumps of armoured flesh. The claws followed, rending through any of the grey warriors unlucky enough to be within range of the warlord’s landing.
Once he was in motion, Corax never slowed. He was a blur of charcoal armour and black blades, carving, chopping, dismembering without effort, mutilating with the barest movement, butchering with an ease that belied his ferocity.
Lascannon fire rained towards the primarch as the Iron Warriors turned their turrets on the gravest threat in range. The Word Bearers caught in the net of streaming fire were sliced apart as surely as the ones killed by Corax’s claws, but the beams themselves flashed aside from the primarch’s armour, never striking it straight-on, leaving savage burn scars without once penetrating.
The voices of dying Word Bearers became a conflicting chorus over the vox.
‘Help us!’ one of the captains screamed to Argel Tal.
The Crimson Lord cast aside the last Raven Guard he’d killed – the warrior’s neck had crackled most satisfyingly as he was strangled – and ordered the Gal Vorbak to charge. It left his helm as a split-jawed roar, for even his face was no longer his own.
Even with the cry reduced to wordless malice, the Gal Vorbak understood and obeyed. The first to reach Corax was Ajanis, and the Raven Guard lord butchered the warrior without even turning to face him. A burst of flame from the flight pack seared Ajanis’s armour, slowing him long enough for the swinging wings to shear through his torso as Corax turned to face other enemies. The crimson Word Bearers leapt and struck at the primarch, but their assault did little more than their grey brothers’ had done.
We die in the shadow of great wings, came the voice from within.
I know.
Argel Tal leapt forward to meet his end at the hands of a demigod.
Lorgar hesitated, and in that moment his crozius maul lowered. Blood marred its ornate head – the blood of the Raven Guard: the same blood that ran in his brother’s veins ran through his genetic progeny.
Bolter shells cracked against Lorgar’s armour, their heat and explosive debris going utterly ignored. Just as the Word Bearers struggled to stand before Corax, so too did the Raven Guard fall back and die in droves to Lorgar’s dispassionate, surgical destruction through their ranks.
Lorgar’s head snapped back as a bolter shell thudded into his helm, disrupting the retinal electronics and warping the ceramite. He wrenched the mangled metal from his face and killed his attacker with a single swipe of Illuminarum. The blow sent the Raven Guard tumbling away over the heads of his retreating brothers, crashing down among them.
‘What is it?’ Kor Phaeron stalked to Lorgar’s side, his claws as wet as the primarch’s crozius. ‘Push on! They are breaking before us!’
Lorgar aimed his maul across the battlefield. Corax was wading through the Gal Vorbak, ripping the crimson warriors apart.
‘Who cares about the albino’s cowardice?’ Kor Phaeron was frothing, spit spraying from his lips as he cursed. ‘Focus on the fight that matters.’
Lorgar ignored the bile in his father’s words, as well as the infrequent shells crashing against his armour. Given a blessed respite from the primarch’s murderous advance, the Raven Guard were falling back from him in a black tide. They left their dead in a carpet at the primarch’s feet.
‘You do not understand,’ Lorgar shouted over the din. ‘My brother is not fleeing. He has flown to where the fighting is thickest. He is cleaving a path to his gunships, drawing the worst of our firepower, so his sons might escape.’
Erebus was a grey blur of lethal motion, hammering an unhelmed Raven Guard sergeant to the ground and killing him with a return swing that caved in the warrior’s skull.
‘Sire...’ The First Chaplain’s armour was blackened from flamer wash, the joints still smoking. ‘Please focus.’
Lorgar clutched his sundered helm in one hand. The vox-link was still open. He could hear the tinny screams of the dying. ‘He is killing so many of us.’
The helm fell, gripped no more. He held his bloodied maul in ironclad fists, and clenched his teeth just as tightly. ‘No,’ the word was breathed with absolute conviction.
Kor Phaeron’s face was a mess of wounds, and even with his augmentations, he was breathing in a hoarse rasp. The battle was costing him dearly. He met Erebus’s eyes for a moment – and something akin to disgust passed between them.
‘Your deeds are ordained on these killing fields,’ Erebus spoke almost as if delivering a sermon. ‘You must not face your brothers yet. It is fate. We play our destined parts, as the pantheon wills it.’