[Sigismund.]
[First Captain of the Imperial Fists. Rogal Dorn's second, and the warrior every observer who had ever watched him fight described the same way: the finest blade below a Primarch that the Imperium had produced. He had just received the Black Sword from the Emperor's own hand and taken the title of Emperor's Champion, and the future that title implied, the Black Templars, the eternal crusade, the far shore of history he would never stop sailing toward, was all still ahead of him.]
[He had also just said something prophetic, in the way that warriors on the edge of the longest war in human history sometimes did: that in the far future, there would only be war.]
[At the moment, he was staring at you through his visor with the focused skepticism of a man who had learned not to trust anything that looked unusual, and most things looked unusual on these walls today.]
[He thanked you for the World Eater. The words were correct and controlled and gave nothing else away.]
[You asked about Rogal Dorn.]
[Sigismund did not answer. He considered for a moment, working through the calculation behind his visor, and then he made his decision: he would take you to Dorn himself. If you were a weapon sent by the traitors to kill Dorn, then Dorn and his gene-son together on the same battlefield would be sufficient to end you before you could act. If you were genuinely a lost loyalist Primarch, then refusing to bring you forward was a risk he was not willing to take.]
[The logic was clean and you appreciated it.]
[You gestured to David, who had dispersed into his swarm configuration across the section of wall above you. The swarm received the instruction and held position, working its way along the wall's length, removing rebel Astartes and Daemons from positions where the mortal defenders were struggling to hold. Then you fell into step behind Sigismund and went into the passages.]
[The interior of the wall system was a network of reinforced corridors and transit routes, built to move troops rapidly between positions along the palace's enormous defensive perimeter. The roar of the battle above filtered down through the stone as a constant, layered pressure, but the passages themselves were temporarily quiet. You moved fast. Sigismund moved faster than his size suggested was possible and did not slow for you.]
[You cleared several levels of internal passage and descended toward the ground level below the walls.]
[The sound of the battle above became more distant. The ash was still falling, drifting through every gap in the structure, settling on the floor of the passage in a thin continuous layer. You were nearly at the ground level exit when the laugh reached you.]
[It came through the grey air with a particular quality: soft, unhurried, self-satisfied, and directed at both of you with the precision of someone who had been watching your approach and had chosen this exact moment to announce themselves.]
["What a coincidence. And a bonus I was not expecting."]
[You and Sigismund reacted simultaneously, the trained instinct of two experienced combatants reading the same threat from the same signal. You moved back to back in the same motion, each covering the other's blind angle, the formation coming together without a word.]
[Footsteps. Unhurried. Coming from the direction of the palace road ahead, where the collapsed masonry and the drifting ash had turned the ground into a grey, irregular landscape.]
[A figure resolved out of the ash-fall.]
[The armor was purple and gold, the colors of the Emperor's Children rendered in plate that had been crafted with the kind of attention to beauty that crossed the line from craftsmanship into something else. The face above the gorget was extraordinary, the particular handsomeness of someone in whom aesthetics had become a pathology, features that had been too perfect even before Slaanesh's touch had added its own dimension to them. Purple eyes. A narrow sword in one hand, the blade bright even in the grey light. A faint purple luminescence that moved across the skin when the ash-light caught it at certain angles.]
["Fallen Phoenician!"]
[You put the name out loud, each word deliberate, carrying across the distance between you.]
[Beside you, Sigismund's response was a full-body reaction he managed to contain: every muscle going rigid, the Black Sword rising to a combat guard, the shock of the name doing what it did to any warrior of the Imperium who had spent the Heresy understanding what that name now meant.]
[The name also did something else. Fulgrim had heard it from your mouth, and Fulgrim knew that the only beings who addressed his brothers by name and title were other Primarchs. Sigismund had his confirmation.]
["You," Fulgrim said pleasantly, his purple gaze moving across your current appearance with the interest of a connoisseur encountering something genuinely new, "are not wearing your original body, are you? Twenty-two. Borrowing your brother's flesh is quite casual of you. Are you not concerned that the False Emperor will simply have you put down for it?"]
[He tilted his head slightly.]
["Why not join us instead? A brother's affection, and more than that — my master would treasure you. Why bleed for a tyrant who has never had warmth to give? The outcome here is already decided. Step across."]
[You looked at him for a long moment.]
["Fulgrim." You let the amusement into your voice. "If I were going to choose corruption, I would pick something with more dignity than what you have become. A genderless freak serving a god of excess. That is not a fate I would choose. And unlike you, I have no interest in becoming someone else's prized possession."]
[Fulgrim's expression did something that, on a face less controlled than his, would have been a flinch. Instead it translated into a very particular kind of interest, the expression of someone who had just found a new sensation.]
["Oh. Your insults are making me feel something."]
[You were already turning your head toward Sigismund, your voice dropping.]
["This is not a fight you can be part of. I am not certain I can win it. Go. Find Dorn and send whatever he can spare. Go now."]
[You did not wait for his response.]
[Your foot came down on the palace floor and the crack of the impact traveled outward through the stone, and then you were moving, your full mass committed to the charge, covering the distance to Fulgrim in the time it took to draw a breath.]
[Fulgrim's armor activated in the same instant, the power systems engaging with a sound like a held note finally released, and the narrow sword came up and began to move. The speed of it was not a Primarch's speed in the usual sense. It was Fulgrim's speed, which was its own category, the blade tracing patterns through the ash-filled air too fast to track individually, only as a collective blur of light.]
[Your arm changed before the first cut landed.]
[The flesh-axe configuration collapsed and the tentacle form assembled in its place, the sucker-covered limb extending across the intervening space and wrapping toward Fulgrim's lower body in the same moment you closed the distance. Fulgrim read it and was already not where you were aiming, his movement a half-step redirect that put him outside the tentacle's arc while the narrow sword continued its work.]
[The cuts came in sequences.]
[Dozens of them. Hundreds. Each one technically perfect, each one placed with the consideration of someone who understood anatomy and pain and the particular geometry of where a blade needed to be to accomplish the most. The adamantium-reinforced restraint armor came apart in sections. The bone scales shattered where the blade passed through them and the flesh beneath opened. Blood ran across your body in sheets, soaking into the ash falling around you, turning the ground beneath your feet dark.]
[You felt nothing recognizable as suffering.]
[What you felt instead was the body responding.]
[The shattered scales did not simply bleed and leave gaps. They collapsed inward and began to rebuild, the fragments pulling together and thickening with each cycle, the individual pieces merging into larger and larger sections until what had been a mosaic of separate scales was becoming something different: continuous plates, dense and layered, the azure blue deepening toward the color of old iron, the separate elements fusing into a coherent shell. Beneath the shell, the blood that moved through the body was doing something with the energy of the damage being inflicted on it, converting the input into output with an efficiency that should not have been possible in organic tissue.]
[The body was building itself a new configuration around you while you used it.]
["Roar."]