V3 Chapter 67: Kosorax the Oathbreaker
The world was burning. Screaming. Blood. Slaughter. Death.
Kosorax sat upon a twisted command throne, looking down at the fortress world burning beneath the Conqueror.
The scent of blood.
Even through the thick hull and tens of thousands of kilometres of void, he could still catch it drifting up from below.
This was the final world.
And it should be him who saw it through to the end, personally.
The blood of eight worlds together would call out to the Red Angel, summoning that being who had already become a Daemon Primarch of Khorne back into realspace.
But Kosorax felt little for his so-called "father."
No one else could have left his sons, whom he had scorned since their mortal days, a legacy of greater suffering than Angron had.
The Butcher's Nails.
Ruin.
The shattering of the Legion.
And a rage that could never be made to stop.
Everything Kosorax had done, he had done for one purpose alone: to bring the Twelfth Legion back together.
The Red Angel held a power to command loyalty that Kosorax himself could never hope to have.
The moment Angron set foot back in realspace, the World Eater warbands scattered across the galaxy would hear his name. Countless berserkers would cross the Warp to gather to their gene-father.
When that day came, Angron could go and deal with the returned son of the Emperor himself.
And he, Kosorax, would be the one who had opened the gates of realspace for the Red Angel.
His name would spread through the entire Twelfth Legion.
Only he could carry the burden of the Legion's future.
Only he still cared!
Kosorax's fist tightened violently around the arm of the throne.
He hated Kharn. He hated Angron too.
Those men had torn the Twelfth Legion apart with their own hands, and left thousands of World Eaters scattered into warbands that tore at one another.
A familiar fury surged up in him once more.
Kosorax raised his left hand, sheathed in blood-red gauntlet plate, trembling, and stared fixedly at his own fingers. The world before his eyes began to bleed red at the edges, and deep within his skull the Butcher's Nails sent stabbing pulses of pain, again and again.
He let out a ragged snarl and clenched his fist tight.
Heavy breathing rasped out from beneath his helm.
Kosorax forced himself to stay seated on the command throne, forcing back, piece by piece, the fury that threatened to swallow his reason whole.
A long while later, he opened his eyes again.
The red bleeding across his vision finally began to fade.
Then he saw the spectre again.
She stood not far from the command throne, speaking calmly of the triumph at Ullanor to a horned skull nailed to one of Angron's faded banners.
She spoke of a fleet that once was.
She spoke of the Emperor.
She spoke of a victory ten thousand years gone.
As though time had never truly passed at all.
Kosorax paid her no mind.
Ever since he had reclaimed the Conqueror, once the Twelfth Legion's own flagship, this spectre had appeared here and there throughout the vessel.
It seemed only he and a handful of senior officers could see her at all.
The spectre walked the Conqueror's passages unhurried, her slender hands always clasped behind her back. A mist of blood trailed slowly in her wake, binding her to the ship's ruined chambers wherever she went.
Her face seemed veiled behind a layer of smoke, impossible to make out.
Now and then, some unsettling shape would surface across that blurred outline.
Something like fury.
Something like indifference.
Or something else again, a thought that still existed, yet had long since passed beyond any sane mind's understanding.
Any creature she turned her gaze upon always felt the urge to flinch away, though none could ever say exactly why.
Kosorax called her the Lady.
He guessed she might once have served aboard this very warship.
After all, in his experience, whatever the Conqueror truly swallowed rarely managed to escape it entirely.
The Lady would occasionally pass judgement on the current state of battle, and sometimes even give orders.
Only Kosorax could hear her.
But he could never truly speak with her.
He could question her, rage at her, demand an answer, and the Lady would never so much as acknowledge it.
She only ever said what she wished to say.
Then left.
More troublesome still, there were times Kosorax could not afford to ignore her commands.
Defy her, and the Conqueror itself might refuse to obey.
Weapon arrays would fail without warning. The main engines would drop power for no reason. The ship would turn of its own accord. Hatches would seal shut with no hand on the controls.
And if the Lady ever truly fell into a rage, things grew far worse still.
Kosorax had seen it happen once.
Since then, he had understood one thing clearly.
He had reclaimed the Conqueror. He had never truly owned it.
Kosorax drew a deep breath and rose from the command throne, that seat fused from flesh and metal both.
The Lady was still speaking of Ullanor to the skull.
He passed by her and crossed to the far side of the command hall.
There stood a great brass pool of blood, called the Blood Mirror, set at the very centre of the Conqueror's command deck.
Eight witches, branded with Khornate runes, hung suspended from the ceiling above. Their blood ran down into a pool forever on the brink of overflowing, yet never quite spilling over.
Around the pool's edge, a cluster of stunted nightmare-things with needle teeth and stunted wings muttered curses at one another in some tongue of the Dark Gods beyond mortal description, and with every strike of their blood-soaked claws, the pool's rendering of the void battlefield sharpened further into shape.
Kosorax stood before the Blood Mirror, watching the shifting image within.
The fortress world of Castellan-Badab was burning.
Its walls had already collapsed.
Its defence batteries lay destroyed.
The Oathbreakers and the other Khornate warbands were slaughtering the last of the defenders amid the city's ruins.
The ritual had entered its final stage.
Once the blood spilled here met the required measure, the war, death, and slaughter gathered across the seven worlds before it would answer as one.
Eight worlds.
Eight blood sacrifices.
Every one of the dead would become tribute offered to the Blood God.
Kosorax looked down at the Blood Mirror.
This, too, was part of his bargain with that being.
He knew someone was using him.
He knew these coordinates, these prophecies, this method of blood sacrifice, none of it could have come from nowhere.
But he did not care.
So long as the Red Angel truly returned, it made no difference who stood behind all of this, pulling the strings.
He would use Angron.
Use the name of the Red Angel.
Use every World Eater's fanatic devotion to their gene-father.
When that day came, the Twelfth Legion would gather once more.
And he would stand at the very front of it.
Angron would kill the returned son of the Emperor.
The entire galaxy would know that it was Kosorax who had completed the eightfold blood sacrifice, Kosorax who had brought the Red Angel down into realspace once more.
And then, he would earn prestige enough.
Enough to gather the World Eaters together again.
Enough to kill Kharn with his own hand.
And in the end, to lead the Legion back to war against Terra itself.
The image within the Blood Mirror suddenly shuddered violently.
Kosorax raised his head.
The last stronghold fell.
Tens of thousands of lives died together on that single battlefield.
Blood ran down through the ruins.
In that same instant, all eight streams of blood within the Blood Mirror boiled over at once.
The Conqueror began to shake.
From deep within the hull came a chorus of roars, as though ten thousand years of dead crewmen were waking all at once.
Kosorax stood where he was.
He knew.
The ritual was complete.
By the time Duvette and Guilliman realised something was wrong, it was already too late.
A terrible Warp storm began sweeping across the edge of the Maelstrom.
Routes that had still been barely passable deteriorated rapidly, vast stretches of space swallowed beneath fresh Warp storms. Astropaths cried out in anguish, and many collapsed into unconsciousness the instant they touched the information reaching them from outside.
The Navigators fared even worse.
They saw the Astronomican's light twisted out of true.
They saw storms the colour of blood rise within the Warp.
Some began to convulse, muttering the same incomprehensible words over and over.
Across the outer reaches of the Maelstrom, one star system after another lost both stable transit routes and astropathic contact.
Ship after ship found itself cut off, alone.
Fleet after fleet lost track of one another's positions.
The four formations Guilliman had earlier dispatched were now entirely out of contact.
The Macragge's Honour could not confirm their positions, nor even tell whether they had received the recall order at all.
The only forces still able to answer to Guilliman's command directly, for now, were the flagship fleet built around the Macragge's Honour itself, and whatever Badab defence zone strength still remained nearby.
That fleet was still no small force.
But Guilliman already understood. The enemy had achieved their purpose.
He stood on the command bridge and gave new orders.
"All ships to first-degree readiness."
"Check every vessel's systems."
"All combat forces prepare for battle."
Order after order went out to the entire fleet.
Duvette stood before the viewport, watching the scene outside.
The void, once pure black, had already begun to take on unnatural colour.
Streaks of light warped and shimmered in the distance, and blood-red shadows kept surfacing at the edges of his sight. Even through the hull and the void shields, he could still feel a pressure that unsettled him deeply.
Guilliman came to stand beside him.
Neither spoke.
Duvette turned his head to look at the Primarch.
Guilliman looked back at him at the very same moment.
They both knew.
Something was coming.
A fury vast enough to set the whole Maelstrom ablaze was drawing near to realspace.