Siege Of Terra Quotes

I asked myself in the aftermath of the Siege of Terra whether the so-called victory was worth the cost. Now I wonder if we won at all.

There must come a moment when the soul knows: this far, and no further. But we are cursed never to hear that warning until it is too late.’ – attributed to the remembrancer Ignace Karkasy [M31]

The first wall of any fortress was the mind, and doubt could burn it from within before the enemy had even raised a blade.

And in the end. It's just a man killing his son with a stone...then the galaxy burns

Mankind has proven to be pathologically incapable of learning from its own mistakes. It blithely remembers the witness of history, but it does not apply the knowledge it gains.

Joy is an act of defiance,’ said the Khan. ‘With joy, we win, even if we lose. To have lived well is a victory all its own, for we all die. Death is unimportant to the laughing warrior. A poet makes tragedy glorious. That is why.

War was a scream in capital letters. It was a noise. It wasn’t even words. It had no syntax, no adjectives, no subtext, no context. It communicated itself as suddenly, simply and unequivocally as a punch in the face. It was a thing, not a story.

When you are strong, appear weak". The first warmaster

When one has no power, one will seek hope from any source.

One step at a time, to do what can be done now, so that what must be done will follow as an ultimate consequence.

Victory is not fate. It is an act of will.' Primarch Rogal Dorn

To know is to be tempted.

Sometimes the best move in politics is to refuse the game in the first place.

We must find our friends where we can, and make those bonds count.

We do not need to be mighty when we are faced with weakness." - Ezekyle Abaddon

The traveller is the one who takes his truth with him into strange lands. The moment he forgets his truth, he ceases to be a traveller, and becomes the strange land.

Would you rather be a victim of genocide, or the architect of a genocide that saves you?’ ‘Fo–’ she growls. ‘Which I believe, by the by, is a guiding philosophy of the Imperial Project.

The truth, Zardu Layak, is the greatest force in the universe. It is not kind. It is not a shield against cruelty. It is the most dangerous thing you can hold, and it is all that matters.

At the root of your lies, is there any truth, father?’ The darkness becomes a forest, dark trunks reaching to an untouchable sky, roots crawling out and down into the abyss beneath. The man on the chair is sitting on the snow-covered ground, a fire burning before Him. A shadow moves out of the dark between the trees. It is huge, sable-furred and silver-eyed. It drags its shadow with it as it comes forwards. It pauses on the edge of the light. ‘You claim to be a man,’says the wolf, ‘but that is a lie revealed to any that can see you here. You deny you wish godhood, but you raise up an empire to praise you. You call yourself the Master of Mankind, and perhaps that is the only truth you ever spoke – that you wish to make your children slaves.

I have done my utmost to make this palace a true fortress,’ said Dorn. I’ve built it from the ground up, diligently… some say obsessively… making sure that it is impenetrable and secure. But that is an impossible task. There will always be cracks, there will always be flaws. No fortress of mere stone and steel in our galaxy is truly impervious. So I must place myself directly before those cracks, and block them with my own flesh and fury.’ He gazed at them steadily. ‘I am the fortress now,’ he said.

And he felt it. Rogal Dorn had been feeling it for days, weeks, building up, up, up, rising over him like a black fog, dragging at his limbs, clogging his mind, making him question every decision he made, every order he gave. He hadn’t had any respite at all, of any kind, for three months. Three months! His sharpness was going now, his reactions were slower. A billion functionaries depending on him for everything, reaching out to him, suffocating him with their endless demands, pleas for help, for guidance. A billion eyes, on him, all the time. And he’d fought, too. He’d fought. He’d fought primarchs, brothers he’d once thought of as equals or betters. He’d seen the hatred in Perturabo’s eyes, the mania in Fulgrim’s, stabbing at him, poisoning him. Every duel, every brief foray into combat, had chipped a bit more off, had weakened the foundations a little further. Fulgrim had been the worst. His brother’s old form, so pleasing to the eye, had gone, replaced by bodily corruption so deep he scarcely had the words for it. That degradation repulsed him almost more than anything else. It showed just how far you could fall, if you lost your footing in reality completely. You couldn’t show that repulsion. You couldn’t betray the doubt, or give away the fatigue. You couldn’t give away so much as a flicker of weakness, or the game was up, so Dorn’s face remained just as it always had been – static, flinty, curt. He kept his shoulders back, spine straight. He hid the fevers that raged behind his eyes, the bone-deep weariness that throbbed through every muscle, all for show, all to give those who looked up to him something to cling on to, to believe in. The Emperor, his father, was gone, silent, locked in His own unimaginable agonies, and so everything else had crashed onto his shoulders. The weight of the entire species, all their frailties and imperfections, wrapped tight around his mouth and throat and nostrils, choking him, drowning him, making him want to cry out loud, to cower away from it, something he would never do, could never do, and so he remained where he was, caught between the infinite weight of Horus’ malice and the infinite demands of the Emperor’s will, and it would break him, he knew, break him open like the walls themselves, which were about to break now too, despite all he had done, but had it been enough, yes it had, no it could not have been, they would break, they must not break… He clenched his fist, curling the fingers up tight. His mind was racing again. He was on the edge, slipping into a fugue state, the paralysis he dreaded. It came from within. It came from without. Something – something – was making the entire structure around him panic, weaken, fail in resolve. He was not immune. He was the pinnacle – when the base was corrupted, he, too, eventually, would shatter.

I’ll be dead, I’ll not care either way. What matters is how I die.’ ‘And how will that be?’ ‘Fighting for freedom and the lives of my companions, bana-madam.

Glory is an empty plate to feed from.

Trust is a commodity that comes and goes, my dearest friend. Faith is eternal.

I believe the young man’s efforts are worthwhile. I see now why the Lord Praetorian initiated the programme, and warranted the return of the remembrancer order. It has value, though I am not sure this is quite how Rogal imagined it. The act of recording history produces a sense of a future. It is, perhaps, the most optimistic thing anyone can do. We will always need to know where we have come from. We will always need to know that we are going somewhere.

I dislike secrecy intensely... It is deceit, and it deserves no place among the honest and honourable doctrines of Fair War. Secrets are volatile and unstable. They are never stored safely. When they emerge, the mere fact of them can damage the friends and brothers around us.’ - Primarch Dorn

Pitiful. To obtain such gifts and not appreciate them. Mortarion’s tragedy was that he had become what he had spent his life opposing. He hated himself. He could not reconcile his own drastic transmutation in his mind. The pestilential stench seeping from his plate was, as much as anything, shame. For our part, thought Ahriman, you are the enemy, Pale King. How ironic you are content to be known by that title now, the name of the very monsters you used to hunt with such glee. Mortarion, witch-burner, purger of wisdom. Louder than any other voice, yours was raised against our being from the very start. There were other accusers too: Dorn, Russ, Corax, Manus, but none as loud or as self-righteous as you. Because of you, Prospero burned and Tizca fell. Russ was the implement, and dread Horus the architect, but you were the instigator who fomented the prejudice to begin with. We have longed to see you punished for that, and this is sweet indeed. Look what has become of you: Manus is long dead; Corax and Russ are broken, and lost from the field of war; Dorn is cornered and sweating out his last hours in a prison of his own making as oblivion descends. But you. You couldn’t even cling on to your principles, unlike them. You, the loudest critic of all, have become one with us. Your strength counted for nothing. You have submitted to the warp, and you loathe yourself for doing so. And we can now watch with relish as you rot and hate yourself for ever. Behind his gold-and-azure mask, Ahzek Ahriman smiled.

I have never looked up and cross-checked so much in my life. I said to John French at one point that if I’d been obliged to do this much referencing while working on, say, a major comic crossover event, I’d have quit. It was stupid levels of minutiae. But something kept me going, and I think it was the simple fact that I love Warhammer 40,000 and have become completely committed to finishing – properly – the job we started with Horus Rising. Let’s face it, there is a certain amount of expectation. The ending needs to deliver.

I saw something I can’t explain,’ Hari admitted. ‘There you go,’ said Piers, as if that answered everything. ‘And I grasp it now,’ Hari said to him. Piers simmered down a bit. He studied Hari’s face. ‘Do you?’ he asked. ‘I do,’ said Hari. Piers nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good, then.’ With some effort, he got back down on his knees, and began scrubbing the banner again. ‘But tell it right, if you’re telling it,’ he added. ‘What I’m saying is, do it justice. Make a proper tale out of it, eh? It wasn’t no banner, it was the Emperor Himself. In person. I stood before the Emperor on the battlefields of Terra, to protect Him. Put myself in harm’s way, for His sake. And it wasn’t no raving World Eater, neither. Make it… say it was the Great Traitor himself. Big, bad Lupercal.’ ‘I’m not putting that,’ said Hari. ‘Why not?’ ‘No one would ever believe it,’ said Hari.

I have done my utmost to make this palace a true fortress,’ said Dorn. ‘I’ve built it from the ground up, diligently… some say obsessively… making sure that it is impenetrable and secure. But that is an impossible task. There will always be cracks, there will always be flaws. No fortress of mere stone and steel in our galaxy is truly impervious. So I must place myself directly before those cracks, and block them with my own flesh and fury.’ He gazed at them steadily. ‘I am the fortress now,’ he said.

…Corswain saw the daemon. How he had not before was not fathomable. There at the heart of the chamber, in the void between all the platforms and apparatus, burned a sun. It was golden, rayed, its light the light of a new day on gently rolling waves. He looked at it and felt the heaviness of his thoughts fall away. The burdens of will and command, of certain death and hopeless struggle, vanishing. He had never realised he was carrying so much, that he had borne the weight of existence on his shoulders. It was gone now. He was free. He was the master of his universe. From here, only what he desired and willed would exist. ‘

The wheel turns. In the end we all return to what we are and to where we began.

Now you see,’ said Yesugei. ‘We are made to be greater than the humanity we serve. The weight of the blade is nothing to us. To ride and fight and bleed for days is nothing to us. Nothing to us… We are made higher and so we lose that part that a child and an old man and a father looking into his child’s eyes knows – that the next step is not a promise. That to live is to fight. We forget that. We forget that life is weakness in the face of eternity. To take the next step only matters if you must fight for it, for the last fraction of ourselves. And taking it you see yourself, true and clear – not a warrior, not a hero, not a story of glory and wonder… Just a lightning flash, a descent from Heaven to Earth, a step taken, bright and fleeting and then gone.

You don’t find the things you’re looking for if you don’t break some rules. You have to walk in a few dark places on your own.

Let me put this another way, Myzmadra,’ he said. ‘You are alone, destitute and in danger. You are very far from home. The unification of humanity passes people like you by. You are the kind of person who looks in at society from the outside, never part of the group, always ill at ease, because you can see how foolish other people are, how quickly they are duped, how fast they take on beliefs they know to be false in order to construct a comfortable reality for themselves. You know instinctively how much they overestimate their understanding of the world. You sneer at their optimism, because you feel only despair. You laugh at their troubles, for their woes are small and pathetic when set against the unfeeling sweep of time. You condemn them for their friendships, because you see betrayal in every smile.’ He leaned forwards. ‘But what really hurts you, is that you long to be like them, for you know you are no better, that your intelligence might be greater, but ultimately it is as limited as theirs. You know enough to know you know nothing, so you yearn for their society, their delusions and their ignorance. You are tormented, because you understand too much, but comprehend far too little.

A rush into the jaws of death, snatched free, to plunge therein again at will,’ he said. ‘I greet death with a smile on my face.

Anything that is easy enough to understand is not powerful enough to be worshipped.

Dorn shook out his shoulders, and raised his sword and shield. ‘Try me,’ he said. They rushed him.

You claim to be a man, but that is a lie revealed to any who can see you here. You deny you wish godhood, yet you raise up an empire to praise you. You call yourself the Master of Mankind, and perhaps that is the ONLY truth you ever spoke- that you wish to make your children slaves"- Horus Lupercal

He had always wanted the world to be just like that – no doubts, no lingering areas of hesitation or equivocation, just action, purity of will and deed, the knowledge that whatever he did could never be, and could never have been, otherwise. From the first day of this rebellion, everything had shaken that single-mindedness. The things he had relied on with total surety had proven to be illusory and weak, and things he had thought of as being fictive and simple-minded had proved to have unexpected power. He had been forced to recalibrate, to reorientate. As every sword-brother knew, the time of greatest weakness was during the correction of a defective technique. He had started to fight… and lose. He had faced Horus Aximand and had been made to withdraw. He had faced Khârn, whom he had not yet been able to bring himself to hate fully, and been beaten. He had even taken on a primarch. Had that been hubris? Or just frustration, a desperate bid to recover his now-so-elusive sense of superiority? If he had somehow done the impossible and bested Fulgrim, would that have finally banished the whispers of doubt? Probably not. The fault had never been external, he knew now – it had always been within him, slowly metastasising, becoming impassable the longer he ignored it. He had needed to hear Dorn’s words of release to understand it. They had, all of them, been fighting with one hand behind their backs, trying to hold on to a dream that had already died. The enemy was utterly changed now. They were physically stronger and morally intoxicated, eagerly drinking up gifts that should have been shunned as poison. And yet, those who remained loyal had tried to cling on to what they had been at the very start. They had still mouthed pieties about Unity and the Imperial Truth long after fealty to such virtues had become impossible. Once he grasped that, once he faced up to it, he had what he needed to remove the fetters in his mind. I no longer fight for the Imperium that was, he told himself. I fight for the Imperium as it will become.

Mankind, in my experience,’ he said, ‘and I think we can at least accept I have more experience of it than most… Mankind has proven to be pathologically incapable of learning from its own mistakes. It blithely remembers the witness of history, but it does not apply the knowledge it gains. The Age of Strife was a terrible thing, inflicted by man upon man. Those few of us who lived through it, and survived it, no matter what part we played, no matter what crimes we committed, we all looked on it during the last years of its horror and said never again. Never again can we do this to ourselves. Yet, mere centuries later, Terra is about to fall, Terra and the galaxy with it, at the hands of engineered humans turning against their creator. This siege, your war, it is self-inflicted.

They shall never have it. They may take all other worlds, they may master the warp, they may despoil the very arch of heaven, but they shall never have this place. It has our mark upon it. It is sacred." One by one, the khans were doing as Shiban did - planting their feet squarely, mastering their hate, returning to their right mind, restoring equilibrium. "When we fight again, it will not be for conquest, nor for vengeance, but to preserve this.

Given the position, Mamzel Keeler, I would do what they suggest.’ He gave a shrug. ‘Though it will mean that I miss our conversations.’ They all looked as though they had just been punched. ‘I am an artist, and a pragmatist. I also like being alive in a universe that is not bound and slaved to the will of extra-dimensional thought-parasites who want to use existence as a playground. I am not an idealist, never have been. That was always the problem with your Emperor, He could never accept anything but the ideal – the one path, His path. And that’s the same for the rest of you who follow that path – you all think that if someone does not agree with you they would be happy to see everything burn as long as the Imperium, and its beloved Emperor, burns too. Well, I would rather that He becomes a false god than everything becomes slaved to real gods.’ He shrugged again. ‘From a purely pragmatic view, you understand.

It’s plainly becoming quite an imperative. Survival, as I found out a long time ago, triggers the most basic, fundamental responses in an organic form. An individual, a species… It will do almost anything, evolve in almost any way it can, in order to stay alive. I called it the Existential Maturation Trigger.

so we lose that part that a child and an old man and a father looking into his child’s eyes knows – that the next step is not a promise. That to live is to fight. We forget that. We forget that life is weakness in the face of eternity. To take the next step only matters if you must fight for it, for the last fraction of ourselves. And taking it you see yourself, true and clear – not a warrior, not a hero, not a story of glory and wonder… Just a lightning flash, a descent from Heaven to Earth, a step taken, bright and fleeting and then gone.

Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

It was as simple as mortal indecision. He didn’t know. Every course ended in disaster. And he couldn’t even pretend that he didn’t care, because he did. God of Decay, no father ever cared more.’ At that, Morarg suddenly remembered what Mortarion had told him. I loved you all too much. That is the only error I will admit.

The concept of luck flew in the face of the Omnissiah’s divine plan and was therefore a falsehood.

My Khan,’ he ventured, not from any lack of resolve, but because it needed to be asked now, needed to be settled, before pulling away became impossible. ‘Can we do this?’ The Khagan nodded fractionally, acknowledging the question. He pressed his fingers harder together. ‘Not if we delay,’ he said quietly. ‘Another day, maybe two, and the moment is gone. Once he has everything in place, we do not have the strength to break him. It must be while he is consumed with his own conquests. He has the numbers, he has the gifts, he has the power. All we have is what we have always relied on. To be faster.’ He smiled darkly. ‘See, what can we really do, for this Imperium? Can we sustain it now, bearing its weight on our shoulders? Not the way we were made. But we can kill for it. We can break, we can burn, we can unmake.’ The smile disappeared. ‘We have done everything they asked of us. We have held their battle line, scored it with our own blood, and it has not been enough. If we are to die here, on a world that has no soul and no open sky to rejoice in, then we will die doing what we were schooled to do.’ He looked out across the entire chamber, making each khan feel as if he were the only one there, the only one to enjoy this final confidence before the war-horns were sounded and the engines were gunned. ‘But get me to my brother,’ the Khan said, ‘and as eternity is my judge, I shall scour his stench from the universe forever.

He slammed hard into contact, his black sword screaming up against the teeth of the enemy’s blade. One, two, three swipes, hard and fast, hammering the Reaver backwards and making him stumble on the loose stone. Sigismund’s severe face twitched into a smile under his helm – a flicker of real enjoyment. He hated this enemy. This enemy was an unbeliever, fallen from the light of hard truth, a thing to be exterminated with joy. That was what had changed. It wasn’t about skill. It wasn’t about the abstract goal of conquest. It was about righteousness. It was about certainty.

Know this, equerry,’ said Perturabo. ‘I pity you. You see, and you know, and you fear for your Legion and wonder what the oaths you swore mean now. Yet you do not have the strength and the power to do the only thing that is left to do.’ Argonis looked as though he might reply, but the Lord of Iron had turned to Forrix. ‘Send a signal to all of our forces, full withdrawal. Bring our fleet into dock and begin to embark. We will move to the system edge and translate. This is immediate.’ Forrix did not move. The words he had just heard rang like bullets hitting iron. ‘Lord…’ ‘It is over,’ said Perturabo. ‘Horus has given this battle to sorcerers and beasts. The war of Legions is over. Mortarion comes here to take this place. He and what he has become is what this war is now. He comes at the will of Horus to be the agent of what will happen.’ ‘But he did not order our withdrawal.’ ‘I order it,’ growled Perturabo. ‘It is my will. There is no victory here, just creatures and parasites pulling down a dying beast. It is gone. The Legion war is dead. The chance is gone. The cause is gone…’ Perturabo paused, and then shook his head. ‘We will not bleed for this. We will not break the circle of our iron for this.

The angel had looked at him for a long moment, the eyepieces in his cracked helm an emerald glow in the dark. ‘It is the Death Lament of Baal,’ he had said, at last. ‘The song of passing from the world.’ ‘You are singing of your deaths because you know we will die here?’ ‘To die is our purpose.

The horde had the numbers to bring about the war’s end, while the defenders only possessed the numbers to delay it – but the losses were going to be grotesque. Ulienne didn’t want to die for the Emperor’s stubbornness. She wanted to live, to see the Warmaster’s ambitions come to fruition. She wanted the Imperium that Horus had promised. An empire for eternity. A kingdom of humanity that would never fall.

There it was again, the treasonous little notion Ulienne couldn’t quite shake. Horus was a hero, the Warmaster of the Imperium, the pacifier of the galaxy. Of course she’d followed him. The Legio Audax had willingly worn his colours and cast their fate with his. But what would be left after this war? What would be left of Terra and the armies fighting to take it? Surely even now, quiescent alien kingdoms at the Imperium’s edges were reawakening, daring to cast jealous eyes at the worlds they’d lost in the Great Crusade. Would there be enough of the Warmaster’s hosts left to hold the Imperium in its entirety? And what would those hosts look like, with all order and discipline and humanity raked out of them? The Legiones Astartes were already blood-maddened and fighting by the side of those… those things. The regiments of Imperial Army wearing the Warmaster’s Eye were no better. Ulienne Grune didn’t want peace. Peace was boring. Peace was for the weak. She wanted wars she could win.

I suppose I don’t know why she kept you on,’ John said eventually. ‘I mean, if she hated all of this so much. Aren’t you just… the worst kind of reminder?’ Leetu chewed steadily. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe that was a problem for her.’ He never really smiled. His bull-necked, slab-muscled head was always held perfectly poised, almost expressionlessly. ‘Or maybe she liked to remember a beginning. From when things were more optimistic.’ John raised an eyebrow. ‘But, if you believe her, she was the one behind it all. No Erda, no traitors. Everyone raised properly in father’s secure Palace, given the guidance they always needed.’ ‘What makes you think that would have gone better?’ ‘Is there a worse outcome than this one?’ ‘I would say so. There usually is.

No running now.’ The Khan’s head snapped back, and blood sloshed down his neck. He had a brief glimpse of the skies above – the mottled incarnadine clouds, hiding the monstrous fleets above – before Mortarion’s profile loomed up to block it. And then the dream came true, just as Yesugei had described it to him – the Lord of Death, rising in darkness over a world of shadow, arms raised for the killing strike. Not everything is fated, the Khan had told him then. ‘It ends,’ Mortarion said, his face a rictus of anger. ‘Here.’ The Khan chuckled painfully under his shattered, lensless helm. ‘See, but I’m laughing now, brother,’ he rasped, the thick blood in his throat making his words gurgle. ‘You should start to worry.

The Khan nodded. ‘Then he wants this as much as I do.’ ‘But Ganzorig is still too far off. We cannot yet give you–’ ‘Time runs out. Are you strong enough?’ And that was the question. The strain of it might kill him before completion. Of more importance, it might kill his lord. But time was already racing away from them while warriors died in the plague-sunk halls of the Lion’s Gate. In that place, at that time, there was only one answer to be made. ‘Give me the order, Khagan,’ Naranbaatar said, steeling himself for what had to come next. ‘I shall be as strong as the task demands.

Did he regret the change? Did Khârn, the most faithful of all Angron’s sons, wish for things to be different? Maybe. Except that he had never known his master undamaged. He had never seen him in his youth, before the Nails had been inserted, and so his loyalty had always been given to a broken angel. And after that, once he’d been given the same bad medicine as his master, it had been easier just to wash any doubt away with fresh blood. When you killed a man, a woman, a child – when you ended a fragile flame of life, when you took away the chance of any further development, of happiness, of sadness, or selfishness or vice or sainthood or intellect – when you did that, in that one moment, the torment ceased. Just a fragment, an atom of peace amid an eternity of rage. But at the same time, in that fleeting glimpse of sanity, you could recall everything you once were. You could remember discourse, and laughter, even pity. And so you had to start again, to move to the next victim, the next challenge, because that knowledge was the worst goad of all. To kill.

Lord Baeron,’ he said again, edging closer so that he was within touching distance of the Blood Angel. ‘You are… you are wounded…’ He heard the words fail as they came from his mouth. What was he trying to do? What was there to do at this moment?

To us He gave His angels… The words ran in his head.

He protects!’ he shouted, and turned to look at the other troopers. ‘He protects,’ called one, not loud but with enough strength to carry. Then another echoed the call, and then another, and it was loud now, voices calling out in released fear and rage and defiance. ‘He protects!’ ‘He protects!’ ‘He protects!’ Katsuhiro nodded and looked at the dead angel whose grave would be the wasteland that he had bled his last on. ‘As we protect Him,’ he said to himself.

This is the gift I bring for you now, my brother,’ he breathed, his metallic voice rattling against the strictures of his corroded rebreather. ‘The gift that only I could bring, the reason the god set me here, in this place, at this time.’ He closed his hooked fingers over the bastion, snuffing it out, masking it with his sealed fist. ‘The last sensation you will ever have. The last emotion you will ever feel. And you will understand, in your soul, who gave it to you, and why you remain powerless against it.’ The sun slipped away, drenching the entire Palace in darkness. All that remained was the vice, the grip, the merciless application of pressure. ‘Despair,’ rasped Mortarion, ascended daemon-king of life and death, plague-maker, hope-ender. ‘I send you despair.

He watched the burning lands, the spoil of a once proud galactic civilisation, brought low by its own vices. ‘I made contact because, if you do this, it may be the last time we ever speak. And so I wanted to send you my blessing. I wanted to wish you luck. And I wanted to express the hope that you’ll ram that damned scythe so far down his throat that he’ll never find his stupid rebreather again.’ The Khan laughed hard at that. Even distorted by the poor link, Sanguinius heard that it was the right kind of laugh – not cynical, not knowing, just a brief break in the suffocating tension. ‘We will meet again, my friend,’ the Khan said. ‘We will build all the things we ever dreamed of. Until then, do what you must. Keep them hoping. Hold the walls.’ The link cut. Sanguinius stood for just a little while longer, alone on the parapet, watching his birthworld burn. He looked over his shoulder, to where the great massif of the Inner Palace rose up. In the darkness, against the gathering glow of the many fires, it looked more like an ossuary than a fortress. ‘I plan to,’ he said softly.

If the Emperor is divine, how can He permit the suffering and disaster that is occurring?’ said Andromeda. Sindermann nodded, his eyes on the books he had placed on the table, his gaze distant. ‘And He is divine – I have seen the truth. Philosophers of a different age would use the same question to undermine the concept of a higher power – there is suffering and darkness and so gods must be false. But gods are real, and there is suffering, so that must be because they permit it… I have not lost my faith. I have found that I believe in a God-Emperor who is less than the divinity I wanted, but the only thing that is true.

Here in the realm beyond sight, there is nothing that is not brought by those that come here. Once, long ago, but aldo a moment past and in a moment to come, this realm was void, without even the idea of dimensions or duration so that it could be called empty. Long ago... Long, long ago... Now it is the place filled with the refuse of its travellers: the husks of grand ambitions and dreams, the shadows of atrocity, and the secrets of the countless dead and the yet to be born. It is both a lie and the truest thing to ever be.

Jaghatai started to cough, sending more bloody spurts out over the ripped-apart ground. His shattered gauntlet still clutched the hilt of his blade, but the arm must have been broken in many places. Only slowly, as he trudged back, did Mortarion realise that the sound was bitter laughter. 'I… absorbed,' Jaghatai rasped, 'the… pain.' Mortarion halted. 'What do you mean?' 'I… know,' Jaghatai said, his voice a liquid slur. 'The Terminus Est. You… gave up. I… did not.' And then he grinned – his split lips, his flayed cheeks, his lone seeing eye, twisting into genuine, spiteful pleasure. 'My endurance is… superior.' So that was what they all believed. Not that he had done what needed to be done. Not that he had sacrificed everything to make his Legion invincible, even suffering the ignominy of using Calas as his foil, even condemning himself to the permanent soul-anguish of daemonhood so that the change could never be undone by anyone, not even his father. That he had been weak.

Over his back, he draws Mourn-It-All and Rubio’s blade.

The seeds of any outcome can always be traced back to some earlier moment, and to all those that preceded it. The further back we trace the path, the hazier the connections will become until the tiniest action might be said to have been the origin of any great event.

Poetry begins with the talking,’ Yesugei had said. ‘And talking is the shadow of the spirit within.

It is not often that we get to learn from the mistakes of the past." Rogal Dorn

She observes their habits and the games they play to stay alert. Regicide, Nine-gambit and Senet in the officers’ refectory; Ashtapada in cartography; Gow, and Hounds and Wolves, in the war room; games of dice and wager in the billet decks; hands of Tarock on the fuse canisters of the autoloaders; rounds of Song and Cartomance in the dining halls, fast-shuffled turns of Thrice-My-Trick in the boiler sumps.

The dead now outnumber the living, but both the living and the dead are outnumbered by the deathless and the never-alive-at-all.

But mettle lasts where metal rusts.

Mortarion was still the greater of them. He was still the stronger, the more steeped in preternatural gifts, but now all that he felt was doubt, rocked by the remorseless fury of one who had never been anything more than flighty, self-regarding and unreliable. All Mortarion could see just then was one who wished to kill him - who would do anything, sacrifice anything, fight himself beyond physical limits, destroy his own body, his own heart, his own soul, just for the satisfaction of the oaths he had made in the void. 'If you know what I did,' Mortarion cried out, fighting on now through that cold fog of indecision, 'then you know the truth of it, brother - I can no longer die.' It was as if a signal had been given. The Khan's bloodied head lifted, the remnants of his long hair hanging in matted clumps. 'Oh, I know that,' he murmured, with the most perfect contempt he had ever mustered. 'But I can.' Then he leapt. His broken legs still propelled him, his fractured arms still bore his blade, his blood-filled lungs and perforated heart still gave him just enough power, and he swept in close. If he had been in the prime of condition, the move might have been hard to counter, but he was already little more than a corpse held together by force of will, and so Silence interposed itself, catching the Khan under his armour-stripped shoulder and impaling him deep. But that didn't stop him. The parry had been seen, planned for, and so he just kept coming, dragging himself up the length of the blade until the scythe jutted out of his ruptured back and the White Tiger was in tight against Mortarion's neck. For an instant, their two faces were right up against one another - both cadaverous now, drained of blood, drained of life, existing only as masks onto pure vengeance. All their majesty was stripped away, scraped out across the utilitarian rockcrete, leaving just the desire, the violence, the brute mechanics of despite. It only took a split second. Mortarion's eyes went wide, realising that he couldn't wrench his brother away in time. The Khan's narrowed. 'And that makes the difference,' Jaghatai spat. He snapped his dao across, severing Mortarion's neck cleanly in an explosion of black bile, before collapsing down into the warp explosion that turned the landing stage, briefly, into the brightest object on the planet after the Emperor's tormented soul itself.

The patient resolve of Rogal, willing to make, abandon, and remake his plans, again and again, over and over, until he has refined the one that will work, unafraid to redraft and change his scheme.

Even a father can learn from his children. The restless fortitude of Jaghatai. The cunning of Alpharius. The confidence of Roboute. The dauntless heart of Mortarion, afraid of nothing, not even death. The way that Russ trained anger to be utterly loyal, while Angron enslaved anger so it could not master him. The patient resolve of Rogal, willing to make, abandon, and remake his plans, again and again, over and over, until he has refined the one that will work, unafraid to redraft and change his scheme.

Emotions are the very root of our supremacy as an organic species. Arising not from the cortex, but from root brainstem consciousness, they are reactive, and function as short-cuts to decision. They facilitate rapid thought and resolution, bypassing processed perception. We think and then act because we feel first. Emotions emancipate our minds, allowing for spontaneous and intuitive cognition, and they remove the need for densely pre-programmed brains. Emotions are symbols, instantly bypassing conscious decision and conveying more than words can ever manage.

What can we really do for this Imperium? Can we sustain it now, bearing its weight on our shoulders? Not the way we were made. But we can kill for it. We can break, we can burn, we can unmake. We have done everything they asked of us. We have held their battle line, scored it with our own blood, and it has not been enough. If we are to die here, on a world that has no soul and no open sky to rejoice in, then we will die doing what we were schooled to do.

The truth is a weapon and a shield.’ - Primarch Sanguinius

Censorship is abhorrent to me,’ said Dorn. ‘It runs against the principles of the society we were meant to be building. Great Terra, I’m beginning to sound as high-minded as Guilliman. My point, Kyril, my point is… we’re not building any more, and we had no idea how words could contaminate everything we hold dear. Remembrancers. Theists. Ideas that, in better times, we might at least have gently humoured. I stand opposed to all that woman Keeler represents, butI would defend her right to say it. In better times. But words and ideas have become dangerous, Sindermann. I don’t have to explain that to you, of all people.

Oll had learned the hard way that those who seemed most clearly in control of things were often the ones with the shakiest grip. Except for Him, of course. He’d always known exactly where He was going.

Only a fool ignores the advice of a brilliant man. Oy an idiot denies the good practice of an enemy.

Let me share a secret with you, Euphrati… There are no gods. That’s the first thing. If there were, they would operate in silent and measureless mystery, their ways too sublime for us to perceive. But there are those who would have you believe they are gods. Who, I should say, want to be gods. And the first step they take to that end? They deny themselves. They assume a humble attitude and declare, “I am not a god… even though you might think I am.” It is a psychological pathway to foster faith. I saw Him begin it all those years ago. I knew that, one day, He would be proclaimed a god. He is, after all, immensely powerful. He will become a god whether He likes it or not. Godhood is the ultimate tool of control. It is the pinnacle of tyranny. Faith drives your followers. Blind faith. You no longer have to make any sense at all, no longer have to justify your actions. You are followed blindly. If, like Him, you do not care to be criticised or doubted, it is a state to be wished for.

I will miss the glory of this day,’ said Sepatus sadly. Sanguinius placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Glory, Bel,’ he said, ‘awaits you wherever you walk.

He soon laid eyes on the enemy again – warriors of Lorgar’s Legion, advancing through the unnatural dusk with raw confidence, surrounded by the spectral flicker of half-instantiated daemonkind. Their armour was carved with words of power, decorated with the bones and the flesh of those they had slain, their helms deformed into outstretched maws, or serpent’s mouths, or the leer of some Neverborn warp prince. Their cantrips stank and pulsed around them, making the natural air recoil and mist shred itself into appalled ribbons. They were engorged with their veil-drawn power, sick on it, their blades running with new-cut fat and their belts hung with severed scalps. For all that, they were still warriors, and they detected Valdor’s presence soon enough. Nine curved blades flickered into guard, nine genhanced bodies made ready to take him down. He raced straight into the heart of them, lashing out with his spear, slicing clean through corrupted ceramite. The combined blades danced, snickering in and out of one another’s path as if in some rehearsed ritual of dance-murder, all with the dull gold of the lone Custodian at its centre. A poisoned gladius nearly caught his neck. A fanged axe-edge nearly plunged into his chest. Long talons nearly pulled him down, ripe to be trodden into the mire under the choreo graphed stamp of bronze-chased boots. But not quite. They were always just a semi-second too slow, a fraction too predictable. The gap between the fighters was small, but it remained unbridgeable. His spear slammed and cut, parried and blocked, an eye-blink ahead of the lesser blades, a sliver firmer and more lethal in its trajectory, until black blood was thrown up around it in thick flurries and the lens-fire in the Word Bearers’ helms died out, one by one. Afterwards, Valdor withdrew, breathing heavily, taking a moment to absorb the visions he had been gifted with each kill. Lorgar’s scions were little different to the true daemons in what they gave him – brief visions of eternal torment, wrapped up in archaic religious ciphers and a kind of perpetually forced ecstasy. They were steeped in some of the purest, deepest strands of Chaos, wilfully dredging up the essence of its mutating, despoiling genius and turning it, through elaborate tortures, into a way of war. To fight them was to be reminded, more acutely than with most others, of the consequences of defeat.

I’m not going back. They need me. There are hundreds of thousands here, millions, in every basement and undercroft. It would be the work of a generation to kill them all, even for these monsters. But we can turn that time against them. Make the survivors forget their fear, teach them to hate. Teach them to venerate the god on the Throne, teach them that their life means nothing in isolation from it. Give them a symbol, give them a means to make fire.’ She smiled. ‘You see a single Sigismund, and your stomach revolts. I will give you a million Sigismunds. A billion. A universe full of them. If that scares you, imagine what it will do to the enemy.

And that was the strangest thing of all – to talk to him again, brother to brother, just for a moment before it had to end. For so long, his every thought had been of the kill that had been denied him, but now it was just the old fraternal one upmanship again, the kind of relentless needle all of them had given one another since the start. Because you could forget, if you were not careful, how alone they were; that no one, not the gods, not even their own father, perceived the universe just as they did. They were unique, the primarchs, bespoke blends of the physical and the divine, irreplaceable one-offs amid a galaxy of dreary mass production. In a fundamental sense, Jaghatai knew more of Mortarion’s essential character than most of the Death Guard, and he knew more of the Khan’s than the peoples of Chogoris. That had always been the paradox of them – they had been strangers in their own homelands, cut off by fate from those who should have been their blood brothers. Now they were all back on Terra, the place of origin, and all that seemed to have been forgotten amid the heedless hurry to murder one another.

Those who demand veneration are never really worth it, in my experience.

Run... Run, father, and know that I'm coming. Run!" - Warmaster Horus

Mortals cannot win war with what is eternal.