Author's note:
I'm posting the first chapter of this novel, completely rewritten from scratch. It was previously titled W40k: Great Angel, but the only thing this version shares with the old one is that Sanguinius is the main character. Virtually everything else will be different. This will be a darker and more brutal story.
The chapters will also be much longer. With the exception of the first one, each will be between 5,000 and 6,500 words.
The Talon pierced beneath his ribs.
He felt each blade. They slid through his armor, through the skin, muscle, and bone beneath, and through both of his hearts, then halted, having reached his back with no further path to take.
Horus lifted him up, bringing their faces close together.
Close enough for Sanguinius to catch his scent. It was not the familiar odor from countless war councils, oil, incense, and cold metal, but something sweet lingering beneath it now. Sweet and rotten, like meat left too long in the sun.
The face above him belonged to his brother's, but it wasn't him. Not truly.
The same heavy brow, the same jaw, the same eyes that had once laughed at him across the campaign tables of the Great Crusade. Yet behind those eyes, nothing he recognized remained. Something else was peering out through them.
And it was reveling in the moment.
The fire within him flared up once more for a fleeting moment as he tried to lift his sword, but his arm remained unresponsive.
Horus leaned in, and Sanguinius watched as his blood trickled down the black plate of his brother's armor in slow, thick ropes. It pooled on the deck between them, so much of it that he hadn't realized he had so much to give.
Then the Warmaster's other hand closed around his wing.
He heard it before he felt it, a wet, splintering crack, akin to a branch snapping across a knee, but louder and stretched longer. The sound echoed as the feathers, muscles, and massive hollow bones gave way, one after another.
Then he felt it.
He screamed. He had never screamed in his life. Not on Signus Prime, not in the dust storms of Baal, not in any of the countless battles and fights he had endured. Now, he screamed with every ounce of strength he had left while Horus laughed in his face and reached for his other wing.
He was still screaming when the world went dark.
Then came nothing.
Not darkness. Darkness had depth, edges, and the promise of morning light. This was not darkness. This emptiness represented the absence of any witnesses left to observe it.
********
He woke screaming, but no sound escaped his lips.
His hand shot to his stomach, searching for the holes the Talon had left in him, but found nothing there.
No holes. No armor. No skin.
No hand.
He tried to push himself off the deck, anticipating the next blow. But there was no deck. No down. No hands to lean on, and no legs to stand on.
'That's impossible.'
This was the first clear thought that emerged in his mind, and he clung to it. There was no trace of his own body, yet the thought was there, and it was real. It was his.
"Horus!"
He shouted it or believed he did. Once again no sound emerged. There was no air to carry it, no throat to produce it.
He was trying to comprehend why he could no longer see the throne room of the Vengeful Spirit.
He recalled it vividly: the brass and black iron, the grand windows framing the burning sky over Terra, his brother looming above him. It had been just a moment ago, a heartbeat ago. He could still feel the cold ache of the Talon's metal claws embedded within him, a chilling reminder of where his hearts should have been, and the two raw wounds on his back were...
He did not finish that thought.
'Where am I?'
He opened his eyes, though he had no eyes to open, and yet he could still see.
The sky was wrong.
At least, that was his initial thought, though it felt foolish because there was no sky. There was no ground either, no horizon to provide direction, and nothing to indicate which way was up and what was down. Only colors existed, and those colors were in constant motion.
It boiled. Purple bled into red, the shade of an opened artery, and the red seeped into green, the color of festering fresh grass, yet none of them mixed. They slid over and under each other like oil on water, and where they touched, faces emerged.
Countless faces rose to the surface of the swirling colors. They opened their mouths, screaming in silence, only to sink back as new faces emerged in their place. A woman with her eyes sewn shut. A child with a missing lower jaw. An old man whose face melted and reformed continuously, his mouth perpetually agape.
He gradually came to understand, with a creeping horror that rose from deep within him, that they were not simply illusions or hallucinations.
They were people. Or they had been, once.
'The Warp.'
He recognized it the way one recognizes the smell of their own blood. He had traversed it countless times inside the steel confines of a ship, shielded by the shimmer of a Geller Field, with a Navigator's third eye guiding his path. He had stood on the bridge of the Red Tear, feeling it press against the hull like the weight of deep water.
He had never been outside.
Now, he was. Alone and exposed to the horrors of Chaos in their natural habitat, on their own territory.
********
They found him soon.
The first entity emerged from the red ribbon of energy. Its shape was elusive, slipping from his grasp before he could fully comprehend it. It manifested as a mouth initially, lined with teeth, ring after ring curving inward like the throat of a lamprey. Along its length, additional mouths opened, each revealing its own gray tongue.
It spoke his name.
It spoke in his own voice.
"Sanguinius," it crooned. The second mouth echoed the name, followed by the third and the fourth, all mimicking the voice he had once used to rally his Legion on the eve of battle. Warm, steady, perfect in every way.
He recoiled, but there was nowhere to retreat.
It bit him.
There was no flesh to bite, yet it found something and clamped down, inflicting a pain worse than Horus's Talon, worse than the torn-off wings. That had been pain in his body; this was pain within him. This pain filled his soul.
He felt something tear loose and vanish. A memory. But he did not remember what. Not anymore. Only a fleeting feeling of anger and pride. It was gone, ripped away and swallowed, leaving him unable to recall what it had entailed, only that it had once been his.
The creature shuddered with pleasure.
More came.
They emerged from the green and the purple, some of them wearing faces. One bore the face of Azkaellon, captain of his guard, its eyes gouged out and its mouth stitched into a grotesque smile. Another wore Horus's face, laughing but with Fulgrim's voice. Yet another wore the visage of a boy no older than fourteen, an aspirant, one of his own, reaching for him with gray hands, weeping.
"Father," it sobbed. "Father, why did you allow him to do it? Why did you let him? We needed you. We needed you, and you abandoned us..."
"Stop," Sanguinius commanded. "Stop. You are not him. You are not any of them."
The boy's face split down the middle, and something with too many fingers crawled out of it.
They seized him.
One grabbed the arm he no longer had. Another seized the spot where his wings had once been, and that was the worst, pain echoing from the deck all over again. One clutched his face. They pulled in different directions, like dogs tearing at a carcass, and he felt himself beginning to stretch, to slowly tear.
He would cease to exist. He didn't know how he knew this, but the thought filled his mind with remarkable clarity. Or something worse. He would be torn into pieces, scattered throughout this place, becoming part of the countless streams of multicolored energy of the Immaterium. Just one more tormented soul here.
Forever.
'No.'
With his entire being, he rejected this thought.
'NO!'
He drew together everything he still was, as he had once rallied his Legion for a charge. His name. His sons. His father. The faces of his brothers. Countless people who make up the Imperium and for whom he felt responsible. He tightened his grip on it all and refused to let go.
In response, something stirred.
Deep within him, beneath memory, beneath name, beneath anything he believed he possessed, something awakened. It flared once, like a coal ignited by a breath. Warmth filled him completely.
The things screamed.
The one with the lamprey mouths let go first. Where it had grasped him, its teeth smoked; then its mouths ignited, consumed by bright, white flames that contrasted sharply with the swirling colors of the Immaterium. It fled, its many voices shrieking in unison.
The others scattered.
He found himself alone, suspended in the storm, trembling… If an entity without a body could tremble at all.
What just happened? What scared off these monstrosities? And when will they return?
These countless questions accompanied him as he drifted amidst the chaotic energy, unable to move or shift his position. The only solace was a small flame burning deep within the core of his being.
How long he remained there, he could not say. A moment? A year? A millennium? Time here did not flow as it should; it pooled around him while faces rose and sank, the creatures without shape circling at a distance, hesitant to approach him again.
Or at least, not yet.
********
At a certain point, whether it was a minute later or a century, he heard it.
So faint at first that he thought he was imagining it, a thread of sound beneath the howling storm. A human voice. Weak. Desperate and breaking apart.
"...Angel... Great Angel... please..."
He froze.
"...Great Sanguinius... I don't... I don't want to die here... not here, not like this, please... please..."
His name.
At first, he took it for yet another of the thousands of voices, belonging to the entities that filled the Warp, that constantly provoked him and tested his patience.
But a moment later, he realized that the voice carried a certain pull, a kind of gravity in a place where gravity doesn't exist.
"The Brightest One… please…"
Instinctively, he grasped the invisible thread of that voice with his mind and allowed himself to be drawn along by it. Anything was better than drifting aimlessly in that void. Sanguinius was already weary of this.
Someone was calling him in the dark, and he answered. As he drew closer, the voice grew louder, its intensity revealing the presence of the man at the end of it.
Cold. So cold.
Terrified.
Alone.
Then the thread pulled tight, and he fell.
********
Varan Sector, Kessran IV, the Halvard Line
101.M41
Sanguinius
Gravity.
That was the first sensation that registered. After the endless nothingness of the Warp, it crashed down on him like a falling wall.
He had a body.
It lay on its back in something cold and wet, and it hurt.
By the Emperor, how it hurt.
Sanguinius had no idea that a body could ache in such a way.
Something had torn open his belly from hip to hip, and when he attempted to move, he felt his guts shift inside him, and his legs were gone below the knees.
He struggled to breathe. His mouth filled with a mixture of blood and mud. He choked, turned his head, and spat, the effort only triggered further spasms of pain.
'This is not my body.'
The thought came slowly, stupidly, through the pain. His hand was small and grey and filthy, with cracked nails and a cheap tin ring on the third finger, and it was weak, frighteningly weak. A human hand. An ordinary human palm, smaller than his own little finger.
He tried to look around to figure out where he was, and it took him only a moment to grasp where he had ended up. He was lying in a trench.
Mud walls, shored up with planks, splintered and black with smoke. The floor was a soup of water and filth. A boot poked up out of the water near his head. Inside it was still a leg, which ended just above the ankle.
Above him, the sky was an inky black, illuminated from below by flickering flames. Nearby, men were screaming in terror. Further away, the thud of gunfire echoed in a slow, weary rhythm, akin to a heart that had been beating for far too long.
And beneath it all, a roar began to rise.
It came from thousands of throats. Tens of thousands.
"WAAAAAGH!"
Orks.
He knew that sound the way he knew his own name. He had heard it on a hundred worlds… He had silenced it on all of them.
He attempted to rise, but his body refused to cooperate. All that remained of his legs were stumps, still bleeding profusely. In truth, this body ought to have been dead ten times over.
But with effort and iron determination, he managed to get one elbow under himself and pushed, only to be met with the agony of his opened belly...
The ground jumped.
Not shook. It jumped. Every puddle in the trench leapt into the air in unison and then fell back, while the planks in the walls rattled like teeth.
Then again.
BOOM.
And again, closer. With each explosion, the water jumped higher, mud slid down the walls in sheets, and a dead trooper, propped against the far side of the trench, slowly toppled over, face first, into the water.
He turned his head and looked up.
It filled the sky.
He had seen Gargants before and had even destroyed them. However, he had always viewed them from the hatch of a gunship or from the height of his own wings. Now, from the bottom of a trench, he saw them through the eyes of a dying man. From this perspective, it was no longer just a war machine.
It was a terror incarnate.
Its body was a massive iron belly, adorned with guns as long as ships. Its head was a grinning Ork face hammered out of plate, with a jaw that snapped up and down as it walked, and out of its mouth poured smoke and fire. Crude glyphs were daubed across its armor in red. Chains swung from its arms, and on those chains hung bodies.
Human bodies.
Some of them were still moving.
It took another step.
The Gargant's shadow swept over him.
He looked up at the underside of its foot. It was as large as a hab block, crusted with mud, rust, and remnants of what had been humans and Orks just a few moments ago. Fragments of them still hung from it, swaying.
It was coming down.
He had no time, nor was he even able to react.
The weight crashed down on him, and in one very short moment he felt his ribs shatter simultaneously and bones turn to dust.
It did not hurt for long.
********
He was out again, engulfed in darkness, plummeting.
He did not choose what happened next; it was instinctive, much like how a falling man instinctively reaches out with his hands. Something nearby felt void, and he seized it.
It was cold.
This body was cold, without any warmth within. It must have been cold for hours. It lay curled at the bottom of a shell crater, half submerged in water, and when he attempted to move it, it resisted him. The joints were locked, the muscles rigid as wood.
He forced it. Something in the shoulder cracked like a dry branch. The body unfolded.
He sat up, water streaming off him in sheets. He could see out of only one eye.
He raised a hand to the other side of his face and discovered it was missing. His fingers probed a wet hollow where his cheek should have been, brushing against teeth, then encountering emptiness, for the jaw on that side had vanished as well, hanging by a strip of skin against his neck.
He withdrew his hand and stared at it. It was stained dark with old blood, now black and sticky.
'What is happening to me?'
He attempted to speak. "By the Emperor..."
What emerged was a thick, gurgling slur from his half-formed mouth, and air whistled from the hole in his face. He halted, repulsed by the sound.
At the edge of the crater, a young soldier crouched with his lasgun, firing wildly into the darkness. He looked no older than seventeen or eighteen. A dirty bandage was wrapped around his head, and he wore no helmet. His hands shook as he gripped his rifle, sending shots in all directions.
He turned when he heard the sound.
He saw the dead man sitting up in the water.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then the boy screamed, a high, thin, awful sound. He scrambled backward up the rim of the crater, kicking at the mud with his heels, and his lasgun fired off into the sky.
"Throne! Throne, Throne, it's Dekker, it's Dekker! He's dead, he's been dead since..."
"Wait," Sanguinius tried to say. It came out as a bubbling hiss. "I am not... I am..."
What was he?
He never found out what he would have said. For something had struck the crater they were in, and his only eye was filled with a flash of fire, followed by even more pain.
********
He was once again falling through the impenetrable darkness.
He grasped something. A white tendril that appeared next to his face. He found himself in another body once again.
The body was fresh and still warm. It must have died only minutes ago, perhaps even less. It lay on its back on the firestep of the trench, a dead Ork sprawled across it, and its crude cleaver was still embedded in the collarbone of Sanguinius's new body.
None of it mattered; now he was consumed by fury blazing like the ever-burning furnaces of Nocturne.
He had been bitten, torn, crushed, and shot. He did not know where he was, when it was, or why any of this was happening to him. He had died, and death had not even had the decency to remain permanent.
He was furious.
With a surge of strength, he threw the Ork off him.
Despite weighing easily as much as three men, he lifted it easily, it tumbled over the parapet and into the dark.
He stood up. Blood dripped from the wound in his collarbone. He pulled the cleaver free and examined it, a crude slab of iron with a blade hammered onto one edge, notched and blackened from years of killing.
The trench teemed with Orks.
They had surged over the top while he was dying in other bodies. They were everywhere along the line, huge, green, and reeking of rot, fungus, and fresh blood. Just as he remembered them. The remaining trooper fought back, but they were losing ground.
He witnessed an Ork lift a man by the head, shaking him violently until his neck snapped. The creature continued to laugh with a morbid excitement.
He witnessed another Ork sink its tusks into a man's face, truly biting down. The creature drove its sharp teeth beneath the cheekbones and violently wrenched its head sideways, twisting the man's screams into something unrecognizable.
"Sergeant Brask?"
The voice came from beside him, a trooper, a woman, her face smeared with soot and her eyes wide with disbelief. Her lasgun hung limply at her side, forgotten. She was staring at him, her expression a mix of confusion and fear.
"Sarge, you were dead. I saw it. I saw it go in; you were... your eyes. Emperor's mercy. What's wrong with your eyes?"
He didn't know what was wrong with his eyes. He could guess. He saw their light reflected in the water at his feet, two points of gold, burning.
He had neither the time nor the right state of mind to explain anything to the soldiers, especially since he himself did not understand what was happening to him. The time for action had arrived.
An Ork charged at them, roaring.
He moved.
He was faster than an ordinary soldier of Imperial Army had any right to be. The body of the dead sergeant moved with a fluidity that during the lifetime of its owner had never known. He felt the moment he struck. The cleaver sliced through the Ork's shoulder and deep into its chest.
He struck the next Ork with his other fist. Its skull caved in like a rotten melon crushed underfoot. But every knuckle in the hand that hit it shattered simultaneously.
He kept going.
"For the Emperor," he cried out. A voice, weaker and higher-pitched than his own, escaped his lips.
He killed another four. Five. Six. He ripped an Ork's jaw off with fingers that no longer bent the way they should and drove the cleaver into the throat of another.
With each blow, the body he inhabited came apart a little more. Ribs cracked as he twisted. A knee twisted sideways when he kicked, yet it held, because he commanded it to hold.
The skin of his forearms split open along the bone.
The pain was not due to any external wound but rather stemmed from the muscle beneath, tearing itself loose under a strain that no human muscle had ever been asked to endure.
The trooper had ceased firing. She pressed herself against the trench wall, her lasgun cradled across her chest like a sacred icon, watching him intently, her lips moving in a rapid, fervent rhythm.
He heard her words, repeated over and over, almost in a frenzy.
"The Emperor protects. The Emperor protects. The Emperor protects."
She was praying to his father.
Once, this would have made him laugh. His father had forbidden prayer, had burned the temples of countless worlds, and had told the broken people kneeling in the ashes that there were no gods.
'Father,' he thought. 'Father, where are you? What has happened?'
Then the next Ork arrived. And the big one to go with it.
It dropped into the trench from the parapet above, causing the water beneath it to leap up. It was twice the size of the others, with iron plates bolted directly into its flesh; the rusted bolts oozed a putrid substance. Its right arm ended in a massive mechanical claw that crackled and spat with blue fire, and on that claw, still twitching, dangled the remnants of a man.
It shook the remnants off. It surveyed the lifeless Orks surrounding it. Then it turned its gaze toward him and grinned.
"Oi," it said, in a voice like rocks in a bucket. "You'z a strong one, ain't ya? Good. Da last lot was too easy."
It raised the claw.
He realized then that this body would not be able to stop it. Not in this state. He needed more.
So he reached for more.
He delved inward, reaching deep into the force that had stirred within the storms of Warp and driven away the creatures that inhabited it. The fire. He summoned it into the body, channeling it into the borrowed chest and arms, much like he once would have spread his wings.
He yearned for those wings. He craved his strength, every bit of it. His true strength. He called it forth into the lifeless sergeant, and it responded.
It came far too much.
Light erupted from his eyes. Not the golden glow of before, but a blinding white and gold light that cast the shadows of every Ork in the trench across the mud like spilled ink. It poured from his open mouth. It streamed through the split skin of his arms in thin lines, like light seeping through the cracks of a burning house.
The Ork halted mid-stride. Its grin wavered.
Sanguinius swung the cleaver.
It was no longer a cleaver. The iron glowed as if it had just emerged from a forge, slicing through the claw and the Ork behind it, emerging on the other side. The two halves of the beast fell, burning, into the water, hissing as they hit.
He felt the body begin to disintegrate.
It began in his hands. The skin of his fingers turned a ghostly grey, then faded to white, flaking away like the edge of a burning page. Beneath, his bones shone with an eerie light. The illumination crept up into his wrists and forearms. He felt his ribs ignite inside his chest, one after another, each transforming into a bar of fire.
"Stop. Stop!"
He tried to pull the fire and the light back down. He didn't know how. He had flung open a door but didn't know how to close it.
The trooper was now screaming, not praying, but screaming, her back pressed against the mud, hands covering her face. Even through the gaps between her fingers, she continued to look at him.
Then the body crumbled, collapsing in on itself all at once, like a log falling into a hearth. It became a heap of glowing embers and pale ash that hissed and spat as it struck the water. The cleaver fell into it, producing a ringing sound.
And of Sergeant Brask, there was nothing left.
********
This time, he found himself back in the Warp.
This time, he did not resist. He hung suspended in the screaming colors while the creatures of Chaos circled him at a distance, cautious now. He allowed their presence; he had nothing left to fight them with.
He forced himself to think. Somehow, he found himself in the bodies of three soldiers who were fighting against Greenskins. And then there is what happened to the third body when he summoned that white flame from within his own being.
'What am I?'
He had once been the Primarch of the Ninth Legion. He had been the Angel, the Great Angel, the son of the Emperor of Mankind.
He was convinced he had died.
So, what was this?
Was it Hell? A cruel jest of the Warp? Perhaps some sorcery from Horus's new masters, a game played with what remained of him, forcing him into broken bodies one after another, merely to witness his failures?
He did not know. He did not know where he was or when. He did not know if Terra had survived. He did not know whether his sons were alive or what had become of the Legion, the Imperium, or his father.
He did not know anything at all.
He drifted as the storm of energies screamed around him, and for a long time, that was all there was.
Then something stirred against him.
Small. So small that he almost missed it. Something that had been clinging to him since... since when? Since the trench? Since the first body, the one beneath the foot?
It was warm. Not with the great heat that slumbered deep within him, but with a gentler warmth. A human warmth. It felt like a hand reaching out for comfort in the cold.
It was frightened. It whispered over and over, so faintly he could barely hear it, a name that wasn't his.
"Mira. Mira. Somebody tell Mira..."
He did not know who Mira was.
He did not know who was calling out for her.
Yet, without consciously choosing to, he realized he had enveloped it, much like a man shields a candle from the wind.