Thief of Revelations Graham Mcneill Of all the truths Ahzek Ahriman had learned as a scholar of the Corvidae, this was the most galling – the understanding that real knowledge came from knowing the extent of his own ignorance. He had believed that he understood the mysteries of the Great Ocean and its myriad complexities, but events on Prospero had shown him that his every certitude poured through his fingers like wind-blown dust. Ahriman’s tower, a spiralling horn of white stone raised on the edge of a geomantically volatile plateau, was a thing of beauty. The glittering ruins of Tizca had been transplanted to this world of warp-charged rock, but Ahriman could not bring himself to reoccupy his former chambers. That time of his life was over, and Ahriman had chosen to wield the power that this world offered to craft a new demesne for himself. A devil’s bargain perhaps, but one that might see the Thousand Sons elevated to their former glory, and vindicate their actions in the eyes of the fools who condemned them. The Book of Magnus, his primarch’s last gift to him, lay open on a lectern of glass and silver, its heavy pages rustling with a life of their own. Precious little else remained of the accumulated knowledge contained within Prospero’s burned libraries, but what he had saved was stacked in one endless shelf that spiralled from the base of the tower to its topmost spire. It was here, at the summit, that Ahriman worked. Held immobile by coruscating chains of light, a bound figure was spread in a cruciform pattern. The body had once been that of a legionary, a perfect representation of all that humanity could achieve. A paladin of enlightenment, but now little better than a monster. His name had once been Astennu, and he had been a brother of the Pyrae Fellowship until the flesh change had taken him. He hung a metre from the reflective floor and fire crawled across his skin. Phosphor-bright traceries limned his veins where aetheric energy oozed through translucent flesh. Daemonic coals burned in sunken eye sockets, and his lips were stretched in the rictus grin of a burning reaper. The mouth moved, but no sounds emerged from Astennu’s throat, only furnace-hot blasts of superheated air. Concentric circles enclosed the transformed legionary, wards that had been used by the Practicus of the Thousand Sons for centuries when releasing their subtle bodies into the aether. By such means were the denizens of the Great Ocean kept at bay, and by such means could a creature of the abyss be contained. Nine circles of lunar caustic were described around Astennu, six of which had already burned away, the argent gleam of each ring slowly fading until it was black and inert. The lustre of the seventh ring was already dying. Ahriman had learned much from the bodies of the flesh-changed that he had captured, marrying his own visionary talents to the bio-transformative empathy of Hathor Maat. Together they had examined the hybrid architecture of forty-five of their former brothers, each time learning something more of the mutations wracking the Legion’s warriors. Ahriman circled the seething fire-creature that Astennu had become, letting his senses push through to the raging cauldron of energy within. Astennu’s voice echoed in his head. +Again, Ahzek? Why do you persist in this foolishness?+ Ahriman made no attempts to justify what he was doing – this warrior was already lost. Those who benefited from his labours would hear any justifications, and by then it would not matter how he had affected their salvation. If Ahriman felt any hubris at such presumption, it did not show. +You are doomed to fail, Ahzek. You know that, of course. Shall I tell you why?+ ‘You are going to tell me anyway, so why bother asking?’ Astennu’s burning grin spread wider. +You will fail because you think the flesh change is to be feared. You think it’s a curse, but you can’t see it for the boon it is.+ Ahriman let his Corvidae sight penetrate the outer layers of the warrior’s burning flesh. ‘A boon? Is it a boon to have all that you once were stripped away? To stand on the precipice of enlightenment only to be dashed down to mutant ignorance? These are boons? No, you were once glorious, but now you are a monster.’ +A monster?+ Astennu chuckled. +The flesh change has shown me that there are few monsters that warrant the fear we have of them. You dread what I and others like me are becoming, but everyone carries around their own monsters. Especially you, Ahzek.+ Ahriman knew that Astennu’s every word was calculated to slip through the cracks in his psyche, and the best barbs were those that came loaded with the truth. He forced Astennu’s words from his mind and traced the myriad paths into the future that followed the degeneration of Astennu’s flesh. While the fiery creature remonstrated and taunted him, he watched a thousand iterations of Astennu’s hyper-evolution. In some, the fire eventually consumed him; in others it waxed and waned, but in none of them did it reverse. Without intervention, Astennu’s body would only ever devolve further into its warped state. Ahriman pulled his power back into himself, feeling the cold of the lunar caustic in his bones as he withdrew into his own mind. His armour felt heavy upon his frame, every plate of ivory-trimmed ceramite shimmering in reflected flame-light. He should have killed Astennu a long time ago, but the things he was learning were enabling him to understand the progress of the flesh change. And what could be understood could be mastered. Such was the suddenness and violence of Astennu’s change that Ahriman had discovered in him with relative ease. The Thousand Sons Chief Librarian’s consciousness lay across this planet like a web, and a warrior’s degeneration plucked at its threads like nothing else. +You can’t stop it, Ahzek. It will come to us all. In time, it will come to you. The ninefold gift is already in you, I see it already.+ Anger touched Ahriman, and he stepped closer to the edge of the circle as the gleaming light at his feet diminished. ‘The flesh change will not take me, Astennu. I will not let it.’ Astennu paused for a long moment. +Whoever said it was up to you?+ Too late, Ahriman realised that the last of the wards around Astennu had burned down to black. The fire-creature hurled itself at him, the shimmering veins of its body flaring with retina-burning brightness. Fiery claws gouged at his plastron. Ahriman swatted Astennu aside with a hurried kine blow, but his former brother sprang to his feet like a cat, his body wreathed in a rippling corona of white flames. The air blurred with heat haze and a wordless babble of un-syllables dripped from Astennu’s lips like curses. Ahriman’s senses flickered into the immediate future, and he swayed aside as Astennu leapt across the chamber. Flames sprang up in his wake, each afterimage of his presence imprinting its shrieking echo onto the world. Ahriman extended his arm and summoned his heqa staff to his hand. He swung it like a broadsword, the curved crook catching Astennu in his midriff and doubling him up. Ghostly flames rippled along the length of the staff, but Ahriman snuffed them out with a thought. Astennu lunged again, and a burst of flaming breath went ahead of him. Before it struck Ahriman, a glittering sphere of freezing air surrounded Astennu – he screamed as his fires were extinguished and the light burning in his veins dimmed to the faintest glow. Held immobile by an orb of purest chill, Astennu raged impotently in his barbarous daemonic tongue. Ahriman felt restless ambition in his biology that spoke of powerful biomancy. A voice came from behind him. ‘A creature of fire and you don’t think to use the Pavoni arts against it? You’re forgetting how to use your powers, brother.’ Ahriman turned to see Hathor Maat with his hands extended before him, a frost-white radiance blazing at his fingertips. Sobek and Amon stood behind him, their auras alight with channelled power. Although his subtle body had been within the protective circle, he had not sensed their approach. The venerable Amon approached the hissing, defiant form of Astennu, studying the warrior’s disfigured physiology with an expression of horror. ‘Astennu…’ he murmured, sadly. ‘Astennu, what has become of you?’ ‘What will become of us all, if we fail,’ Ahriman replied. Amon nodded, accepting his words, but unwilling to say so. ‘Not to sound petulant,’ Hathor Maat strained, ‘but there’s only so long I can hold this cryo-sphere. So hurry up and kill him.’ Ahriman drew his power back into himself, rising into the Enumerations to focus his thoughts. He nodded to Hathor Maat, who dropped his hands. Astennu flew at them, but he was halted mid-leap as Sobek trapped him in a kine web. Ahriman’s will was a physical thing, an extension of his force and strength, multiplied many times over. It took hold of Astennu and broke him in two. A hideous crack of splitting bone filled the chamber and the firelight in Astennu’s body faded like a snuffed lumen. His aetheric aura dispersed like wind-blown smoke, and a sliver of Ahriman’s heart turned to stone at the loss of another of the Thousand Sons. Hathor Maat saw his anguish. ‘Don’t waste your sorrow on degenerates like him.’ Ahriman rounded on the Pavoni, angrily. ‘The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.’ Amon turned the dead body’s head from side to side, as if to find something to explain its degeneration. Sobek knelt, and ran a finger through the powdered lines of lunar caustic. ‘You take too many risks delving into the flesh of the Changed Ones,’ he said. ‘I risk more by not delving,’ Ahriman replied. ‘We all do.’ ‘And did you learn anything of use from him?’ asked Amon. Ahriman hesitated. ‘I now see how the corruption spreads.’ ‘But not how to reverse it?’ ‘No, not yet.’ Amon shrugged. ‘We should take this to the Crimson King.’ ‘You know we cannot,’ Ahriman snapped. ‘Why? Tell me. He stopped this once before. He can do it again.’ ‘He did nothing but postpone our degeneration. In his arrogance, he thought he had mastered what the powers of the Great Ocean started.’ Amon laughed derisively. ‘And you think we can stop it? Now who’s being arrogant?’ ‘You have been away from the Legion too long, Amon,’ Ahriman growled. ‘Your wanderings take you to the farthest corners of the world, but what have you learned? Nothing.’ Amon stepped close to him. ‘Then I have learned as much as you, Ahzek.’ Sobek was quick to step between Amon and Ahriman. ‘The primarch could help.’ Ahriman shook his head, and flipped the Book of Magnus to a page of half-completed formulae and esoteric calculations. ‘We have been down this road before, brothers. When the Rubric is ready, we will bring it to our father. If he should learn of the Great Work while it is incomplete and untested, he will stop it.’ Hathor Maat touched the yellowed pages of the Book of Magnus as though it were a holy relic. ‘You presume he cares enough to stop it. When was the last time any of us saw Magnus, or felt his presence abroad in the world?’ Their silence spurred Maat to loquaciousness, never a difficult task, and his features subtly shifted to assume a more stately look. ‘Magnus broods alone in the Obsidian Tower. Who knows what thoughts fill his head? Certainly not the fate of his few remaining sons.’ ‘You presume too much, Hathor Maat,’ said Amon. Once the equerry of the primarch, he was always first to rise to his master’s defence when words became heated. ‘Do I? Then what do you suggest we do? Meekly await what the tides of the warp decree for us? Damn that, and damn you.’ Hathor Maat strode to where Astennu’s twisted corpse lay, the nobility and awesome majesty it had once possessed now ruined and corrupted. ‘This will not be me. And if I have to go against the primarch’s wishes, then so be it.’ Amon’s cheeks flushed with colour and his aura shifted into the higher Enumerations of combat. But Sobek amplified his Corvidae powers to project futures of broken bones, burned flesh and their own ruination into each warrior’s mind. ‘Enough.’ Amon and Hathor Maat flinched at images of their own deaths. Both adepts earthed their power and the dissipating energies flared from the psycho-conductive spire of the tower in a burst of aetheric fire. Ahriman stepped to the chamber’s centre. ‘We are embarked on this course and our purpose is set. To forget one’s purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.’ ‘And to repeat the same thing over and over again and expect different results is the very definition of insanity,’ said Amon. ‘Then what do you suggest?’ ‘You know what I suggest.’ Ahriman sighed. ‘Very well. I will speak with the Crimson King.’ The Obsidian Tower was well named, a crooked spike of black rock that towered above all else. Its impossible construction had been achieved in moments, a passing fancy of the Crimson King made real. Its substance was angular and glassy, like napped volcanic rock, and striated with darting lights. No windows or openings marred its surface, save those willed into being by the primarch. At its peak hung a pellucid radiance; part illumination, part eater of light. It was impossible to look and not feel the gaze of the Crimson King, an all-seeing, all-knowing presence that left no shadows in which to hide secrets. Ahriman kept his gaze averted. On a world saturated with warp energy it was a matter of supreme ease to travel from one place to the next in the blink of an eye, yet Ahriman still chose to travel via Thunderhawk. Like everything on this world, the aircraft had not escaped the transformative energies of their new home. Its structure had become altogether more avian in plan, more raptor-like in profile. The power in its name had wrought a transformation all of its own. Ahriman brought the craft around in a slow turn, circling the tower for a place to put it down. Vivid electrical storms raged like the afterimages of titanic battles in the heavens, and the jagged peaks on every horizon were limned with electrical fire that spat traceries of lightning into the sky. Sentient zephyrs chased the Thunderhawk, scraps of febrile consciousness that flocked to men of power like acolytes to a high priest. Millions of them attended upon Magnus’s tower like the accretion rings of planets or bloodsharks with the scent of prey in the water. Ahriman angled the Thunderhawk around as an opening shaped itself in the upper reaches of the spire and a shelf of glassy rock extruded from its substance. He feathered the engines and raised the craft’s hooked nose as he brought it down with a gentle pressure of thought. He allowed the engines a moment to cool before making his way to the assault ramp and descending to the tower. As always, he felt the charge in the air, the sense of potentiality that existed in every moment. Here breath had power, and his was seized upon by the invisible zephyrs that flocked to him. Ahriman ignored them and strode into the tower through an elliptical archway with edges that curved like a dancing flame. The space within was enormous, too vast to exist within the circumference of the tower, and lit in the soft glow of a librarium. Spiralling stacks and shelves groaned under the weight of myriad forms of knowledge: parchments, scrolls, data-crystals, hide-bound tomes, psy-songs and haptic-memes, each bearing a fragment of priceless knowledge borne from the sacking of Prospero. To an outsider, such a collection would appear extensive, a repository of knowledge unmatched by any beyond the great vaults of Terra. But to the Thousand Sons these were scraps, a fraction of the accumulated wisdom gathered from the corners of the galaxy over the last two centuries. It made Ahriman weep to know that such irreplaceable wisdom had been lost for the sake of spite and jealousy. ‘Was it worth it, Russ?’ he muttered. A voice came from above, resonating with the sorrow of the ages. It was a voice that knew neither surprise nor joy, and was all the sadder for having once basked in such wonder. ‘Don’t speak his name.’ ‘Father.’ ‘Why do you disturb me?’ Ahriman could see no sign of his gene-sire. The voice emanated from everywhere and nowhere, a disembodied spirit that could have been whispering in his ear or shouting from deep inside the librarium. ‘I wish to ask you something.’ ‘You did not need to travel to the Obsidian Tower for that.’ ‘No, but some things are best spoken face to face. Father to son.’ There was a pause, then a sudden swelling of presence; a fundamental change in the secret physics of the world. The librarium vanished, and Ahriman found himself at the very summit of Magnus’s tower, raised above it as a god above his domain. The world curved away, as though he were a giant stood upon a globe, and he saw the fiefdoms of the warrior-sorcerers who had escaped the final slaughter at the Pyramid of Photep. From a Legion of thousands, these paltry few remained. ‘We would like to live as we once lived,’ Ahriman said. ‘But history will not permit it.’ There was a crack of lightning and a sudden surge of power, and then the primarch was simply there. He looked down at Ahriman. ‘But a small body of determined warriors fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.’ The Crimson King, he was called. The Red Cyclops. Magnus of the One Eye. All these epithets and more had been heaped upon him – some in praise, most in fear. The Magnus that towered above Ahriman was clad as he last remembered him, going out to battle the Wolf King in a howling storm of black rain. A blood-red breastplate, sheathed in twin horns of bone and draped in a mantle of amber mail. A kilt of sun-baked leather, edged in gold and stamped with an ivory representation of the Legion’s serpentine symbol. His crimson hair was wild, the mane of a visionary or madman. The primarch’s features were bronzed and ruddy, yet beneath it all was a fiery light, the sun at the core of his being simultaneously filling his fictive body with its radiance and reflecting it. That light shone strongest through his eye, a singular orb of gold, flecked with undreamed colours and hardened by the sorrow of one who rued the day he saw further than he ought. This was Magnus as he wished to appear: a demigod wrought in the image of a lost past by the memories and emotions of his favoured son. Magnus was a being on the cusp of some great transformation, but where that would take him was a mystery that not even he could answer. Ahriman fought the urge to drop to his knees. Since coming to the Planet of the Sorcerers, Magnus had demanded that none of his sons bend the knee to him, but some habits die hard. Contrary to outward appearances, the top of Magnus’s tower was open to the elements, and the kaleidoscopic storms raging overhead were close enough to touch. Blistering energies of unimaginable power danced overhead, their potency an elixir in Ahriman’s blood. ‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?’ asked the primarch, speaking with the pleasure of a shared secret. ‘It’s incredible.’ Magnus walked a slow circuit of the tower, and capricious arcs of lightning slithered around him as though he were a lodestone. ‘Like attracts like. The power in me is that of the Great Ocean. Distilled through my reborn flesh into something purer, but still… chaotic.’ In the presence of Magnus, it was impossible not to feel like a helpless student at the feet of an omnipotent master. There was so much Ahriman wanted to ask, but he forced his tumultuous thoughts into the placid Enumerations to focus himself. ‘I have been working on something I think you should see.’ ‘Yes, I know. You have been working tirelessly upon the flesh-changed of late.’ Ahriman fought to conceal his shock. ‘You… You know?’ Magnus turned and gave him a skewed look. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t?’ Ahriman realised he had been naive to believe the Crimson King would be ignorant of his Great Work, but was still surprised at how transparent he must have been. ‘This is why you intrude on my labours?’ Magnus asked. ‘Yes, my lord. I have read everything in the grimoire you entrusted to my care, and there is a spell that I believe will–’ ‘Why have you really come here, Ahzek?’ Ahriman walked to the edge of the tower, his cloak flowing around him in the winds from the volcanic plains below. Jagged rocks reared up from the base of the tower like black fangs in the mouth of a predator. ‘Because I need your help,’ he said. ‘We cannot do this without you. We have learned much, but we are blind men searching for revelation in all the wrong places.’ ‘So you wish my blessing and my help? Well, I do not give it. You are walking a dangerous path, my son. Trust me, I know the nobility that drives you, I felt it myself. But you would think that you had broken the curse of the flesh change only to be deceived by the very power you believed had brought you success.’ ‘But surely, together, we could finally find an answer?’ Magnus shook his head. ‘No, I cannot help you. Moreover, I will not help you. And you are to cease all efforts in this matter. Do you understand?’ Ahriman felt his control of the Enumerations slipping as he rose into a higher, combative stance. ‘No, I do not.’ Without seeming to move, Magnus swelled to become a towering giant, a feral beast of blood-matted fur with hardened skin. His single eye became a molten sun that pinned Ahriman in place, a carcass set for the spit. ‘Your little cabal is no more,’ he boomed. ‘“And woe betide he who ignores my warning or breaks faith with me. He shall be my enemy, and I will visit such destruction upon him and all his followers that, from now until the end of all things, he shall rue the day he turned from my light”.’ Ahriman recognised the words and the bitterness that dripped from every syllable. Only one question remained to be asked. ‘Why?’ The awful threat and terrible danger faded from Magnus’s eye as his physique returned to its former stature. ‘Because matters of greater import occupy my thoughts.’ ‘Matters greater than your Legion’s end?’ Ahriman demanded. Magnus did not answer, and cast his eye to the raging storms of light above him, as though the answer lay within them. His features softened and took on a thoughtful cast. ‘Much more important,’ he said at last. ‘Tell me. Tell me, that I might understand why you abandon us.’ Magnus nodded and reached out to place a bronze-skinned hand upon his shoulder. The Planet of the Sorcerers fell away like a shining bauble dropped down a darkened well. ‘I will do better,’ the primarch said. ‘I will show you.’ Ahriman felt a terrible dislocation, like the wrench of a teleport, but a hundred times worse. His genhanced frame, bio-engineered to resist the extremes of any environment, was suddenly that of a frail mortal as his subtle body was ripped from his flesh. His body of light soared through the Great Ocean, borne upon the back of a fiery golden comet, a presence of such power that he dared not look directly upon it. He knew that this was Magnus, but in the trackless wildernesses of the Great Ocean, it was no longer constrained by any constancy of form. Stars and galaxies spiralled around him, an endless parade of random events that were not random at all. Everything proceeded to the design of fate’s architect, a pattern so grand it could only be glimpsed from beyond the farthest extremes of existence. Even then it was beyond Ahriman’s ability to comprehend, its complexities too subtle and its intrigues too tightly woven to be understood. Sickness built in Ahriman’s belly, a bone-deep vertigo and a dizzying sense of falling. He struggled not to cry out. He was nothing to this universe, an insignificant grain amidst a desert of wind-scattered dust formed from the inconsequences of the galaxy. He was not special. He was not anything. ‘No!’ he cried out in desperation. ‘I am Ahzek Ahriman!’ And with that thought he was whole again, a warrior-scholar of the Thousand Sons. He forced his mind into the second Enumeration, where bodily concerns were put aside in favour of the pursuit of enlightenment. His body was gone, and in its place was a shimmer of light; a conglomeration of wheels turning within wheels, eyes by the million and a form as immaculate as it was unknown. This was the purest expression of his being, a creature of light and thought. The voice of Magnus came to him through senses unknown, each word freighted with terrible foreknowledge. ‘Come, my son – we will be thieves of revelation. See what I see, and tell me I am wrong to think beyond your concerns.’ Suddenly, Ahriman did not want to look. Once he looked, nothing would ever be the same. But he could not refuse his primarch’s demand, and the comfort of ignorance was something to be shunned. His shining body flew close to the radiant form of Magnus. ‘Show me everything,’ he said. ‘Everything? No, not that. Never that. But I will show you enough.’ ‘Enough for what?’ ‘Enough to know that we still have a choice before us, one that will affect how we are remembered by the tides of history.’ The stars wheeled around them, streaking by in a blur. They travelled at the speed of thought, and where thought willed them, they arrived in an instant. The sensation was spellbinding. Like gods they bestrode the galaxy, travelling its length and breadth with each moment. Ahriman had just begun to appreciate the wonder of his primarch’s power, when he realised that they had stopped moving, the world resolving around him in the familiar patterns of stars and the elliptical orbits of planets. ‘Where are we?’ he asked. ‘This is Tsagualsa, the carrion-world of the Night Haunter. A place of murder and torment, where the screams of the dying are never-ending. A place from which my brother wages a campaign of genocide. It is from here that he was sent to fight the First Legion of the Lion.’ They spun through the system, past worlds dead and worlds ravaged by conflict, mayhem and the collateral damage of two Legions at war. Ahriman felt his gaze drawn towards the system’s edge, where a vicious battle raged in the void, two fleets battering at one another at close range. Intermingled warships engaged in broadside brawls, filling the space between them with high explosive ordnance and criss-crossing las-fire. Wrecks blazed from prow to stern and split apart as their keels broke under intense gravometric pressures. Ahriman saw thousands of soul-lights flickering out of existence, lives lost by the hundreds every second. ‘This is the death rattle of the Thramas Crusade,’ said Magnus, grimly. Ahriman spun around the battle, a ghost of light bearing witness to the cold, airless slaughter. The black ships bearing the winged sword were in the ascendance, reaping a dreadful tally among the midnight ships of the Night Lords, but it seemed the VIII Legion was not seeking a decisive engagement. Magnus went on. ‘For two years they have beaten themselves bloody against one another, but with this battle, the war is over and my brothers retire to lick their wounds.’ ‘Who was the victor?’ ‘That remains to be seen, though the Dark Angels still bear with them the seeds of their own destruction. In such times, can anyone be called the victor?’ The heavens blurred again, and this time Ahriman felt resistance to their passage. One by one, the stars went out, snuffed like candles in a novitiates’ dormitory until all was darkness. Beyond the black curtain, Ahriman saw a burning world, cracked and ravaged by fire. Its continental plates had split apart, and an eightfold symbol was burned into its crust. Beyond this was a planet wreathed in a glittering corona of battle, a red world bathed in blood and madness. Ahriman made to fly onwards, to see what new insanity was at play, but a gentle psychic pressure from Magnus halted him. ‘No, my son. To come any closer would see you tainted by the madness that would drag Sanguinius and his Angels to their doom.’ ‘The Blood Angels, destroyed?’ ‘Time will tell, for Sanguinius stands at a crossroads. He knows both paths end in blood, but he is stronger than anyone understands. Well… almost anyone. Guilliman knows, but even he does not truly know his brother’s wounded heart.’ The image of the blood-red planet faded, replaced by the vast gulfs of wilderness space between worlds – emptiness that the human mind was incapable of grasping. ‘Why are you showing me this?’ asked Ahriman. ‘Because I will not be made a fool of, again,’ Magnus spat. ‘Prospero burns because I thought I knew more than anyone else. If we are to choose a course for our Legion, I would have it be the right one. And to that end, I travel the stars and time itself to find my brothers, to know with whom they stand.’ Ahriman felt the emptiness around him grow ever more claustrophobic, like the walls of a meditation chamber inexorably closing in. What had felt unimaginably huge and spacious a moment ago, now felt cramped and constricting. ‘That is the weight of our decision pressing in on us, Ahzek,’ the primarch said. ‘War has come to the galaxy – a war like never before, and soon I will have to choose a side.’ ‘Why must you choose a side? We were betrayed by the Emperor, and Horus Lupercal has nothing to offer us.’ ‘Think you so? Then let me show you Ultramar.’ The glittering form of Magnus flared brightly, dragging Ahriman in his wake as they plummeted through space once more. This time they travelled to a blue world that withered in the hell-storm of its doomed star. Its cities were flayed by radioactive winds, and those souls not yet below in the subterranean arcologies were already dead. ‘I know this world,’ said Ahriman, horrified at what he saw. ‘I came here after visiting the Crystal Library on Prandium. This is Calth.’ Ships of war scattered from the doomed planet, the gold and azure of the XIII Legion and the bruise-red of the XVII. The Ultramarines vessels regrouped, while the Word Bearers used the chaos of battle’s end to scatter into the darkness between the Five Hundred Worlds. Even as Ahriman watched, a storm exploded from the planet’s surface, like the most terrible eruption on the surface of a star. Invisible to the naked eye, it was a vast outpouring of inchoate energies to those with a link to the aether. It engulfed Calth, and soon spread beyond its system boundaries, a ruinous storm of epic proportions that burned like a voracious forest fire. Uncontrolled, raw and bleeding-edged, the storm tore through the immaterial realm without direction, a raging barrier of hatred and spite that was impassable to all but the most powerful individuals. The energies expended in its creation beggared belief, and Ahriman found it hard to comprehend that something so devastating could come about naturally. But who except the Thousand Sons had the power to summon anything like it? ‘They burned Calth…’ he murmured, incredulously. ‘For Monarchia?’ ‘Monarchia? No, Calth was but a prologue. Lorgar’s vision is grander and wider than the death of a single world, and the cold logic of Guilliman’s “practical” is yet to play out in all its majesty and tragedy. Already the pieces are moving, and I sense that this will be the key to everything.’ Ahriman could scarcely believe it. ‘Lorgar dares to assault the Five Hundred Worlds? Has he gone mad? Guilliman’s armies are Legion. Lorgar could never defeat the host of Ultramar.’ Glittering amusement passed through the luminosity of Magnus’s form. ‘I will pass your sentiments to my brother when I see him next. After all, history teaches us that there is no such thing as an invincible army…’ He paused, seeming to consider that truth for a moment. ‘But sometimes, history needs a push.’