The ground murmured with his landing. Claws slashed from their power-fist housings with silver flashes, and shimmering wings of dark metal reached up from his shoulders into the air above. Slowly, so painfully slowly, he raised his head to the traitors. Black eyes stared from a face whiter than Imperial marble, and written across the pale features was the most consummate, complete anger Argel Tal had ever seen. It was an emotion truer and deeper even than the rage that ruined the faces of the daemons within the warp.
And Argel Tal realised it was not anger, nor rage. It went beyond both. This was wrath, in physical form.
The primarch of the Raven Guard turned with an inhuman cry, letting the thrumming wing-blades affixed to his smoking jetpack slice out with their killing edges. Word Bearers tumbled away in droves, shredded into lumps of armoured flesh. The claws followed, rending through any of the grey warriors unlucky enough to be within range of the warlord’s landing.
Once he was in motion, Corax never slowed. He was a blur of charcoal armour and black blades, carving, chopping, dismembering without effort, mutilating with the barest movement, butchering with an ease that belied his ferocity.
Lascannon fire rained towards the primarch as the Iron Warriors turned their turrets on the gravest threat in range. The Word Bearers caught in the net of streaming fire were sliced apart as surely as the ones killed by Corax’s claws, but the beams themselves flashed aside from the primarch’s armour, never striking it straight-on, leaving savage burn scars without once penetrating.
The voices of dying Word Bearers became a conflicting chorus over the vox.
‘Help us!’ one of the captains screamed to Argel Tal.
The Crimson Lord cast aside the last Raven Guard he’d killed – the warrior’s neck had crackled most satisfyingly as he was strangled – and ordered the Gal Vorbak to charge. It left his helm as a split-jawed roar, for even his face was no longer his own.
Even with the cry reduced to wordless malice, the Gal Vorbak understood and obeyed. The first to reach Corax was Ajanis, and the Raven Guard lord butchered the warrior without even turning to face him. A burst of flame from the flight pack seared Ajanis’s armour, slowing him long enough for the swinging wings to shear through his torso as Corax turned to face other enemies. The crimson Word Bearers leapt and struck at the primarch, but their assault did little more than their grey brothers’ had done.
We die in the shadow of great wings, came the voice from within.
I know.
Argel Tal leapt forward to meet his end at the hands of a demigod.
Lorgar hesitated, and in that moment his crozius maul lowered. Blood marred its ornate head – the blood of the Raven Guard: the same blood that ran in his brother’s veins ran through his genetic progeny.
Bolter shells cracked against Lorgar’s armour, their heat and explosive debris going utterly ignored. Just as the Word Bearers struggled to stand before Corax, so too did the Raven Guard fall back and die in droves to Lorgar’s dispassionate, surgical destruction through their ranks.
Lorgar’s head snapped back as a bolter shell thudded into his helm, disrupting the retinal electronics and warping the ceramite. He wrenched the mangled metal from his face and killed his attacker with a single swipe of Illuminarum. The blow sent the Raven Guard tumbling away over the heads of his retreating brothers, crashing down among them.
‘What is it?’ Kor Phaeron stalked to Lorgar’s side, his claws as wet as the primarch’s crozius. ‘Push on! They are breaking before us!’
Lorgar aimed his maul across the battlefield. Corax was wading through the Gal Vorbak, ripping the crimson warriors apart.
‘Who cares about the albino’s cowardice?’ Kor Phaeron was frothing, spit spraying from his lips as he cursed. ‘Focus on the fight that matters.’
Lorgar ignored the bile in his father’s words, as well as the infrequent shells crashing against his armour. Given a blessed respite from the primarch’s murderous advance, the Raven Guard were falling back from him in a black tide. They left their dead in a carpet at the primarch’s feet.
‘You do not understand,’ Lorgar shouted over the din. ‘My brother is not fleeing. He has flown to where the fighting is thickest. He is cleaving a path to his gunships, drawing the worst of our firepower, so his sons might escape.’
Erebus was a grey blur of lethal motion, hammering an unhelmed Raven Guard sergeant to the ground and killing him with a return swing that caved in the warrior’s skull.
‘Sire...’ The First Chaplain’s armour was blackened from flamer wash, the joints still smoking. ‘Please focus.’
Lorgar clutched his sundered helm in one hand. The vox-link was still open. He could hear the tinny screams of the dying. ‘He is killing so many of us.’
The helm fell, gripped no more. He held his bloodied maul in ironclad fists, and clenched his teeth just as tightly. ‘No,’ the word was breathed with absolute conviction.
Kor Phaeron’s face was a mess of wounds, and even with his augmentations, he was breathing in a hoarse rasp. The battle was costing him dearly. He met Erebus’s eyes for a moment – and something akin to disgust passed between them.
‘Your deeds are ordained on these killing fields,’ Erebus spoke almost as if delivering a sermon. ‘You must not face your brothers yet. It is fate. We play our destined parts, as the pantheon wills it.’
‘Kill. The. Raven. Guard.’ Kor Phaeron growled through bleeding lips. ‘That is what you are here to do, boy.’
Lorgar stepped forward and cast a sneer that settled over both his mentor and ancient foster father. ‘No.’
Kor Phaeron screamed in frustrated anger. Erebus remained composed. ‘You have laboured for decades to raise an army of the faithful, sire: a Legion that would die for your cause. Do not deviate from the path now you at last possess what you have dreamed of.’ Lorgar turned from them both, first watching the retreating Raven Guard, then seeing Corax slaughtering his way through Word Bearers – some armoured in grey, some in crimson.
‘We have found gods to worship,’ he said, staring without blinking. ‘But we are not enslaved to them. My life is my own.’
‘He’ll kill you!’ Kor Phaeron’s sluggish Terminator warplate wouldn’t let him run, but there was real fear, real sorrow, beneath the anger and panic. ‘Lorgar! Lorgar! No!’
Lorgar broke into a sprint, boots pounding over the churned earth and dead bodies of his brother’s Legion, and for the first time in his life, he went to engage in a battle he had no hope of winning.
‘My death is my own, as well,’ he breathed the words as he ran.
He saw his brother – a man he’d barely spoken to in two centuries of life, a man he barely knew – butchering his sons in a vicious rage. There was no thought of conversion. No hope of bringing Corax into the fold, or enlightening him enough to cease this murderous rampage. Lorgar’s own anger rose to the fore, burning away the passionless killing of only moments ago. As the Word Bearers primarch hammered his way through the Raven Guard to reach his brother, he felt power seethe within him, aching to rise out.
Always, he’d bitten back his psychic potential, hiding it and hating it in equal measure. It was unreliable, erratic, unstable and painful. It was never the gift it seemed to be for Magnus, and thus, he had swallowed it back, walling it up behind unyielding resolve.
No more. A scream of release tore itself free, not from his mouth, but his mind. It echoed across the battlefield. It echoed into the void. Energy sparked from his armour, and a sixth sense unrestrained at last, with its purity perhaps coloured by Chaos, exhaled from his core. A sound like the crashing of tides in the Sea of Souls swept through the ravine, and Lorgar felt the heat of his own fury made manifest. He felt his unchained power reaching out, not only to enhance his physical form, but reaching to his sons across the battlefield.
And there he stood at the heart of the killing fields, winged and haloed by amorphous contrails of psychic fire, shouting his brother’s name into the storm.
Corax answered with a shriek of his own – the call of the betrayer, the cry of the betrayed – and the raven met the heretic in a clash of crozius and claw.
This, came the voice, is the cry of the gods we have both been waiting for.
Argel Tal had no hope of replying. The pain knifing through every cell in his body was enough that he sought to slay himself, clawing at his helm and throat, feeling his fingers burning with his own blood as he ripped hunks armour from his flesh, and fistfuls of flesh from his bones.
Do not fight the communion.
Again, he ignored the voice. He wasn’t dying, no matter how he tried. A hooked claw tore the skin from his throat, and with it, half of his collarbone. He inflicted similar injuries upon himself with each second, but he wasn’t dying. He scrabbled at the armour and bone shielding his two hearts, feverish in his need to wrench both of them from his chest.
Communion... Ascension...
The winged shadow vanished from Argel Tal’s vision, and above him the sky was brightened by the last rays of the setting sun.
I am alive, he thought, even as he tore himself apart, even as he ripped a handful of steaming organ meat from his shattered ribcage and burst his first heart in his hand. I did not die beneath the shadow, and I cannot destroy myself now.
This pain will bleed you of sanity. Let me ascend!
Despite agony no living being had ever survived, there was still a moment of fierce resistance in the war behind Argel Tal’s eyes. He wanted to die, to taste nothingness, not to endure further corruption. The sentience that was Raum found itself shackled deeper within by a soul ruthlessly unwilling to surrender.
I will save us, not harm us. RELEASE ME.
The Word Bearer’s concentration went slack, not because he believed the daemon’s words, but from reaching the absolute end of his strength.