All that came out was a scream of pain.
Alivia looked down and saw four parallel blades jutting from her chest. They pinned her to the black wall and her blood ran down the blades and into the gate.
‘I don’t know who you are, but I need that open,’ said the Warmaster.
‘Please,’ said Alivia as the pain finally caught up to her.
Horus snapped the talons of his gauntlet from Alivia’s body. She fell, and it felt like she fell for a very long time before she hit the floor.
She looked up into the Warmaster’s face.
She saw no pity, no mercy. But, curiously, she saw regret.
Alivia struggled to speak, and the Warmaster knelt to hear her valediction as the life bled out of her.
‘Even... souls ensnared by evil... maintain a small... bridgehead of good,’ she said. ‘I want... you... to remember that. At the end.’
Horus looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled. And for a moment, Alivia forgot that he was the enemy of humanity.
‘You shouldn’t put your faith in saints, mamzel,’ said Horus.
Alivia didn’t reply, looking over the Warmaster’s shoulder.
The gateway of black obsidian was bleeding.
Horus stood from the body of the dead woman.
He wished she hadn’t died so he could ask her how she had come to be here. But she had stood against him and tried to stop him from achieving his destiny. And that was a death sentence.
‘Who was she?’ asked Mortarion.
‘I don’t know, but I felt the touch of father upon her.’
‘She met Him?’
‘Yes,’ said Horus, ‘but a long time ago I think.’
Mortarion looked up at the gate, clearly unimpressed. Horus saw his brother’s expression and put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Don’t underestimate what our father did here,’ said Horus. ‘He broke through into another realm, a realm no other being has breached and lived. Such a journey would make the climb to your first father’s hall seem like a pleasant stroll.’
Mortarion shrugged. ‘I don’t much care what He did,’ he said. He tapped the butt of Silence against the body of the woman. ‘She was here to seal the gate. Do you think she succeeded?’
Horus reached out and laid his palm flat against the black wall. He felt micro-tremors in its surface, too faint to be perceived by anyone save a primarch.
‘Only one way to find out,’ said Horus, unsnapping the seals across his breastplate. ‘Take that reaper of yours and cut me.’
‘Cut you?’
Horus shed his armour, letting each plate fall to the ground until he stood clad only in a grey bodysuit.
‘I was told this gate can only open in blood,’ said Horus. ‘So cut me and don’t spare the edge.’
‘Sir,’ said Kibre coming forward. ‘Don’t. Let one of us do it. Spill my blood, use as much as it takes, even if it kills me.’
Little Horus and Ezekyle joined their voices in opposition to his desire for Mortarion to cut him deep.
Horus folded his arms and said, ‘Thank you, my sons, but if I’ve learned anything from Lorgar, it’s that somebody else’s blood won’t do for something like this. It has to be mine.’
‘Then let’s get this done,’ said Mortarion, hefting Silence and readying its blade. Where some of Horus’s brothers might balk at the thought of wounding him, Mortarion had no such qualms. If his brother sought to usurp him, this was his chance.
Horus locked his gaze with his brother.
‘Do it.’
Mortarion spun Silence around his body.
The blade flashed.
Horus howled as the Death Lord’s reaper cut him from clavicle to pelvis. The pain was ferocious. Its savagery took him all the way back to Davin’s moon, and Eugan Temba’s stolen blade.
Blood jetted from the wound and sprayed the black wall.
Through eyes wet with pain, Horus saw unfinished sigils and arrangements of arcane significance. Their brightness was dying, washed away by the tide of his blood.
The gouges his talons had torn were bleeding.
His blood and the woman’s mingled, and Horus saw hair-fine cracks spreading from where he’d marked the wall.
He grinned through the pain. Worldbreaker swung to his shoulder.
‘Time to earn your name,’ he said.
The Emperor’s gift swung round in a sledgehammer arc.
And smashed the wall to shards.
Absolute darkness spilled into the chamber like a physical thing, as though an ocean of dark matter filled the mountain above and was now pouring out.
Horus felt hurricane winds tear at him, yet was unmoved.
He felt the cold of space, a soul-deep chill that enveloped him in ice. He was alone, floating in an empty void.
No stars illuminated him.
He had no memory of passing through the gate, then berated himself for so literal an interpretation. The gate beneath the mountain was not a literal portal separating one space from another, but an allegorical one. Just by spilling his blood upon stone that was not stone he had passed through. By enacting his desire with Worldbreaker, he had hurled himself heedless into the domain of gods and monsters.
A realm he knew of only in myth and the ravings of lunatics put down in proscribed texts and lurid works passed off as fiction. This was a place unconstrained by the limits of the physical world. The laws governing existence in the material world held no sway here and were endlessly flouted.
Even as he came to that understanding, the void surrounding him conspired to refute that notion. A world faded up, a terrible place of bone white sands and blood-red mountains and orange skies lit by global fires.
The air tasted of ash and regret, of sorrow and fecundity.
Horus heard the clash of swords, but no battle. The plaintive cries of lovers, but no flesh. Whispers surrounded him, plotting and scheming as he felt the cyclic entropy of his flesh. Old cells dying, new ones born to replace them.
He blinked away the heat of the sky, now seeing it wasn’t the orange of a reflected blaze, but the blaze itself.
The heavens were on fire from horizon to horizon.
A firestorm blazed over distant mountains, swollen by forks of ruby red lightning rippling upwards from their summits.
Horus felt the ground beneath him become more solid, and looked down to see that he stood within a circle of flagstones fashioned from obsidian. Eight radiating arms vanished into the far distance, and the landscape twisted in hideous ways along each of the pathways.
Acres of wire grew with the moaning bodies of his closest sons hung upon barbed spikes. Flickering lights skimmed desolate bogs that burped and hissed with the decay of rotting corpses. Silken deserts of serpentine fogbanks of perfumed musks. Labyrinthine forests of claw-branched trees clung to a series of rounded hills, each with eight doors set around their circumferences.
‘I’ve travelled realms like this before,’ said Horus, though there was no one to hear. No one obvious, at least.
Each of the four cardinal paths ended at a mountaintop fortress to rival that of the Emperor’s palace. Their walls were brass and gold, bone and earth. They glimmered in the ruddy light of the firestorm. Screams issued from each of them and booming laughter of mad gods rolled down from the peaks.
‘They are mocking you,’ said a voice behind him.
Horus turned, knowing what he would see.
The Cruor Angelus was the red of a battlefield sunset, its armour no longer splintered and broken, its face no longer a charred nightmare of agony. The chains encircling its body were gone, but the light of extinguished suns still burned in its dead eyes.