V3 Chapter 27: The Age of the Primarchs Is Over...?
Deep in the Eye of Terror, a vast fleet hung in silence above a daemon world.
The surface of that world shifted endlessly in fire and distortion, mountain ranges moving slowly like living things, the seas carrying the wreckage of warships and the shattered idols of dead gods. In orbit, warships were stacked in layered formations, their black silhouettes swallowing the light the daemon world cast into the void.
At the centre of the fleet, a gloriana-class battleship rested at the deepest point, surrounded on all sides by the vessels that attended it.
The Vengeful Spirit.
Once Horus's flagship. Now Abaddon's.
Its existence alone was a declaration. The Chaos warlords who had put on black armour and acknowledged the name of the Warmaster bowed their heads in the shadow of this ship. Others had never truly submitted and yet dared not underestimate its master.
Deep inside the ship, Abaddon sat on his throne. His presence alone was enough to keep the Black Legion warriors, Chaos champions, sorcerers, and thralls around him in silence and deference.
Zaraphiston stood at the foot of the throne.
This former Thousand Son sorcerer, one of the most valued seers in the Black Legion, delivered his message in a tone of complete gravity.
"An ancient sun has rekindled on Macragge."
He paused, then continued. "It was disturbed by something that lies beyond the reach of fate. That thing does not belong to any path I can see, nor to any omen I can interpret."
Abaddon did not answer immediately.
He sat with his eyes closed, as though absorbing the true weight of what had been said.
He was not slow.
Macragge. An ancient sun. Relit.
A prophecy like that did not need to be stated plainly.
After a long silence, Abaddon opened his eyes.
The golden irises, stained that colour by long exposure to the light of the Astronomican, gleamed in the dark.
Every sound around the throne vanished in an instant.
Abaddon rose.
Every Black Legion warrior bowed simultaneously, and the sound of armour striking armour spread outward through the hall. The Chaos champions let the contempt fall from their faces. Even the sorcerers stopped their murmuring.
"Roboute Guilliman," Abaddon said quietly.
The name settled through the hall.
He showed no fear.
But everyone present could feel it: the Warmaster's fury was rising.
"I have said it before. I will drown Terra." Abaddon's voice climbed. "I have said it! I will make that corpse pay the price!"
His hand moved to the hilt of his sword.
"Nothing will stand in my way."
He descended one step from the throne.
"Even if the son of the Corpse-Emperor has returned, I will show him that his time is over!"
That oath rang between the iron walls of the Vengeful Spirit and spread outward into the shadow of the Warp.
Abaddon understood clearly that Guilliman's return would alter many of his plans. It would give the Imperium a banner to rally behind again. It would let worlds that should have continued rotting entertain the illusion of order once more.
That did not mean he would immediately commit everything to a reckless crusade.
Before he broke out of the Eye again, he needed more strength, and more answers.
What exactly had woken Guilliman?
Deeper in the Warp, a decaying world rotated slowly beneath a sky of poisonous cloud.
It was the home of the Death Guard, and the domain of Mortarion.
The sky above the Plague Planet hung perpetually low. Sickly green-grey lightning rolled through heavy cloud. Pus and corrupted blood moved slowly through the fissures in the earth. The swamps bubbled, and when the bubbles broke they released spore-laden mist into the air.
Cities lay half-sunken in the rotting ground like enormous corpses.
The surfaces of tall towers were carpeted in rust and fungal growth, and a bell tolled in the distance, each stroke sounding like the laboured breath of something that was almost done dying. Death Guard warships hung in orbit, trailing plague clouds around their hulls as though waiting for the next seeding.
Mortarion stood at the summit of one of those towers.
His pale, decaying frame was enclosed in battered armour, and the translucent wings at his back spread slowly, their edges dripping lines of corrupted fluid.
Behind him, countless Nurgle daemons and Death Guard warriors recited something in low voices.
The will of the Grandfather had just settled in his mind.
Roboute Guilliman had returned.
Mortarion tightened his grip on the scythe in his hand.
One of the brothers he despised most. The thirteenth son of the Corpse-Emperor, the one who had always wanted to sort the world back into tables and edicts, had risen again.
And he intended to begin his restoration of Ultramar.
That word made Mortarion's stomach turn.
Restoration.
Order.
Rebuilding.
Each of those words carried a false sweetness that he could not stand to hear.
Mortarion raised his head toward the depths of the poisonous cloud and said quietly: "Father, I hear you."
He could feel Nurgle's satisfaction.
It was an invitation.
Guilliman wanted to rebuild Ultramar, wanted to make those worlds clean and prosperous and strong again. Mortarion would show him a different kind of flourishing.
Fungal growth would cover his lands.
Flowers would bloom from the bodies of the dead.
Plague would take root in temples, barracks, and noble residences.
"Pitiful brother," Mortarion said quietly. "You still believe in that thing. A rotting corpse."
His wings spread fully.
Pus dripped from the wing membrane and burned dark patches into the stone below his feet.
"Then let me show you what true growth looks like."
The Death Guard warriors raised their heads.
The Nurgle daemons gave a low, rolling sound of satisfaction.
Mortarion made his vow in silence.
He would let Guilliman and his Imperium rot together.
Above Sortiarius, the sky churned with unnatural light.
This world of sorcerers, famous across the galaxy, hung deep in the Warp. Black mountain ranges thrust from the earth, and blue-violet flame flowed through the fissures between them. The high-altitude storms had never stopped, and every lightning strike left a path that traced some irregular thread of fate.
In a tower built from crystal and obsidian and flowing runes, the one-eyed crimson daemon stood before a vision.
Magnus frowned.
He already knew of Guilliman's return.
The fact itself was not inexplicable.
The Imperium still commanded enormous resources and still held too many secrets, and those detestable Aeldari had never truly left the currents of fate. A sleeping Primarch being woken again was not the most absurd thing to occur in this age of madness.
But Magnus had still detected the wrongness in it.
It came through his formidable psychic intuition, like a string plucked softly and then returned to stillness by the time he looked toward it.
He spread his divination again.
Runes flared. Starlight fell. In the crystal mirror surfaces, Macragge appeared, then Ultramar, then Terra, and countless paths in the process of changing.
The result was calm.
No obvious external interference.
No answer sufficient to explain the unease he felt.
Guilliman's fate moved forward in the mirrors like a path that had been relit. It had its difficulties, its wars, its blood, and the possibility of failure.
But that fate was entirely normal. And yet Magnus knew there was something he could not see clearly that had disturbed his brother's fate.
That was the real problem.
Magnus petitioned the Lord of Change for analysis.
The crystals in the tower vibrated simultaneously, and tens of thousands of runes lit and went dark in rapid succession. The response from Tzeentch unfolded in the depths of his consciousness, like a door that kept changing its shape.
All things are change.
Though some fates do not fall within it.
Magnus was silent for a long time.
He looked at the vision again, trying to find the fracture within Guilliman himself. But every image told him the same thing: the Primarch's return was not the anomaly.
So he shifted his gaze away from Guilliman.
If the abnormal fate was not within the Primarch, it might be concealed somewhere near him.
The images in the crystal mirrors began to change.
The light of Macragge faded. The golden point of light in the direction of Terra blurred. Countless fine threads extended outward from Ultramar, passing through war, celebration, fleet movements, and concentrations of power, until several extremely thin lines led to another Warp scar somewhere else in the galaxy.
The Maelstrom.
Magnus looked at that name.
It was thick with ambition, fracture lines, and rebellions that had not yet broken open. Imperial law moved slowly there. Astartes oaths became dangerous there. Many possible futures lay concealed in the wounds around that region.
Perhaps the answer was not on Macragge.
Perhaps the variable that had unsettled him would leave its trace on the road leading toward the Maelstrom.
A light moved through Magnus's single eye.
In that case, he could bring his brother a considerable gift.
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