u/CamarillaArhont

>As they broke through the far side of the ash forest, the land opened up again, revealing more plains ahead, running down to a wide river valley. The soil was broken by impact craters, many of them dozens of metres across. A road snaked down towards the sluggish river’s edge some distance to their left, but the asphalt had been smashed up, either by munitions or just the passage of heavy military convoys. The distant water glimmered coldly in the night air, steaming gently as if made acidic. On the nearside shore, maybe a kilometre and a half distant, the black silhouettes of buildings clustered together.
Thalis crawled forward, placed magnoculars to his face, and studied it. After a while, he passed the instrument to Julatta.
‘Can’t see any movement. Could be deserted.’
Julatta took a look. Most of the buildings had been badly damaged, with huge gouges torn out of their flanks. The stone and rockcrete were black from fires, and rubble was strewn across the spaces in between. No lights shone. It had never been an important site, by the looks of it – just a way station on the river route towards bigger and better places. No doubt one of the Armada’s armies had crashed through it en route to somewhere else. She swivelled the view around. On the edge of the old settlement, out where the landscape gave way to mudflats, bodies were hanging from makeshift poles. The decomposition was advanced – they had been there for months, she guessed, and were now little more than ragged skeletons slowly falling apart.
‘Could be,’ she said. ‘Stripped bare, I think.’
‘We should check it out, though. We’re running low.’
He was right. The few supplies they’d taken from the gunship were now gone, and thirst had returned. These places had always been sparsely populated, so it was anyone’s guess when they might get another chance.
She scanned the ruins carefully, taking her time, watching for any movement at all. ‘We’ll go down.’
The troops reached for their weapons, and the diminished group crept cautiously down the long incline towards the settlement. They stayed close together, keeping their bodies low, tensed for any signs of life. Julatta and Thalis led them, using the cover of the many craters and zigzagging ever closer to the settlement’s edge. Every so often they’d stop, hunker down, wait, listen. Every time, they heard only the languid gurgle of the acid river and the dull boom of the clouds above.
They reached the first buildings, all little more than empty shells. Thalis gestured for his troops to follow him in. It was eerily quiet. Nothing moved, and the shadows lay thick in the gloom, like oil spilled across the dirt. Two larger buildings loomed up out of the darkness on the side of a rubbishstrewn courtyard, one of which looked to have its old doors still hanging. Julatta saw the Imperial symbol for the Munitorum supply corps over a lintel, and beckoned to Thalis.
‘That one,’ she whispered.
Thalis nodded, and they all moved towards it. Before they had got halfway across the courtyard, Julatta heard something stir.
‘Halt!’ she hissed, crouching down and bringing her laspistol up. The rest of them did the same, sweeping the muzzles of their weapons around.
For a moment, nothing changed. The empty facades of the buildings gazed back at them. The wind skittered through the wreckage.
Then, as silently as ghosts, figures emerged from the darkness. They came from all sides, first a few dozen, then more, until hundreds were around them. They were all baseline human, clad in rags, stick-thin. Even in the dark, Julatta could see that they were sick. Exposed patches of skin were a range of hues, from brown to grey; lips were covered in sores; eyes were weeping.
She froze. No one spoke. Her mind raced – were these creatures of the gods? Believers, like them, lost in the wilderness? Could they be reasoned with?
The expressions on their faces soon told her all she needed to know. No, they were not believers. They were wearing Imperial work-shifts and civil defence uniforms. Some had the aquila marked on their foreheads in what looked like ash. Others of them carried infants in their arms, hanging back but staring at the intruders with a cold, sullen hatred. Many of the rest held weapons. Crude things – wrenches, improvised machine-part blades, cudgels. No doubt these people had lived here for a long time. They had seen their world destroyed, their homes broken, their people slain. These were all who remained.
Thalis rose to his feet. He’d seen the same thing. One by one, the rest of them did the same. None of the townspeople had lasweapons, it looked like. That probably wouldn’t matter, given the numbers, unless they could be intimidated by a few well-placed shots.
Julatta addressed the man in front of her, who seemed as likely as any of the others to be their leader. ‘We just need supplies,’ she said, carefully. ‘Then we’ll go.’
He came closer. He made no attempt to guard himself. The look he gave her was one of pure, distilled hatred. When he spoke, the accent was so strong that she could barely understand the Gothic. She realised that this was the first time she’d heard a Terran native speak. All this way, all this anguish, and only now, when all was over, had she properly encountered the objects of Horus’ grand endeavour.
‘Why give you anything?’ he said. ‘You’ve already taken enough.’
‘If you fight us, more of you will die.’
The man laughed – an ugly snarl of a chuckle. ‘We’re dead already.’
He didn’t make a move, though. Why didn’t they attack? Were they scared to, for all their front? Then she realised the truth – they weren’t quite sure yet. Not completely. Julatta might almost have been one of them, by her looks, even more so Thalis and all his fighters. None of them still wore the markers of their allegiance – after so long in the wilds, they all appeared more or less the same as any other survivors. She glanced over at Thalis, who had clearly come to the same conclusion. It might be possible. Even now, they might be able to pass – claim to be loyal, attempt to hide the truth. He would want to do that. The deception would only have to be fleeting, just enough to get them past this ambush.
She smiled dryly. No. No, that would not do. If all the words she had spoken over the past seven years had not been entirely in vain, then there could be no deception. You might creep around on Terra for a few days, or weeks, or even months longer, but the end would be the same. Thalis was a good servant of the gods, but his hope was misplaced. Just as the Astartes had told her, this was the end now. She holstered her laspistol, reached into her jerkin and began to unwrap the witch’s sword.
‘Then you are still slaves of the Tyrant,’ she said, pulling herself up to her full height. It suddenly felt like the early days again, when crowds would cram themselves into the underground chambers to listen to her words of sedition. ‘Even now, when you have been shown your folly, you do not recant. Another way was shown to you. The path of truth. We fought across the stars to deliver it to you, and still you did not have the eyes to see it. Thus you are punished. Thus will all unbelievers be punished.’
She held the jewelled blade aloft, and its edge glinted strangely in the night air. Thalis whirled around at her, eyes wide with disbelief, but the crowd needed no encouragement. They rushed as one, men, women, even children, screaming now, driven by every atrocity and indignity they had endured. Thalis’ troops fired on them, as did those of her cult who had laspistols. A few of the Terrans went down, but not enough – soon they were all over them, kicking, lashing out, dragging bodies to the bloody dust. Julatta slashed once, twice, felling an assailant each time, but then a heavy fist smacked into her head from behind, and she staggered. A boot came in, a crack of something hard over her back. She sprawled in the dirt, face-first, and barely had the strength to roll over.
The man stood over her. In the darkness he looked towering, maleficent.
He crouched down, and she saw his face up close. Lined, marked with illness, coarse from labour, just like all the faces had been on Ursis. So little difference, for all that they came from opposite ends of the galaxy.
‘Death is too good for you!’ he spat at her. As he pulled his arm back for the blow, Julatta could see that his eyes were full of tears. She wondered how many souls he had lost. Family, friends, comrades – so many would have gone. This was more than anger. This was total despair, total humiliation. They had nothing left, all because of the inferno her actions had kindled for gods that had now fallen silent.
Before she realised it, her eyes spiked with tears too. She made no attempt to evade the strike.
‘I know,’ she breathed, as the cudgel came down.

It was interesting to see Julatta witnessing the fruits of her labours first hand and being ridden with doubts over the silence of her gods throughout the book, until finally deciding to double down, even at the cost of her own survival. Also one of the most dramatic moments in the book.

After Horus was wounded by Russ, Lorgar came to conclusion that he can't be trusted to lead Chaos to victory and decided to murder and usurp him. On Lorgar's orders, Crimson Apostle Zardu Layak used Fulgrim's true name to force him to gather the Emperor's Children and help in killing Horus.

>The black-and-green gunships swept in from beyond the horizon. Stormbirds and Storm Eagles, flanked by interceptors and boxed by strike fighters. Guns rotated in their mounts. Targeting pods swept over the ranked Word Bearers and scattered Emperor’s Children.
‘One quick missile and this would all be over,’ hummed one of Eidolon’s honour guard that Layak had not met before, a warrior with a swordsman’s swagger and silver-drowned plate.
‘No,’ purred Fulgrim as the aircraft spiralled overhead. ‘No, no, no, my beautiful Telemachon. First, we would not get the missile loose before we became blood slime under those guns, and second, you do not kill a creature like Horus by shooting his transport down. It is unseemly and lacks the required symbolic flourish that my brother sets such store by.’ Fulgrim flicked a needle smile at Lorgar. ‘Isn’t that right, brother-my-delight?’
‘Begin the cacophony as soon as he sets down,’ said Lorgar, without looking around. Layak waited for a moment and then breathed the command into Fulgrim.
‘As you say,’ hissed the daemon primarch. ‘It will be done. Eidolon, set my sons to singing.’
‘A pleasure,’ the Lord Commander gurgled, and hissed a command into the vox.
A Stormbird burst from above the dais. It was black, its fuselage darkened by soot. Red, slit eyes gleamed on its wings and cheeks, each one set in an eightpointed gold star. Thrusters rotated down its fuselage, slamming it to stationary in mid-air. It descended. Coils of dust rose in the downwash.
High above the surface of the world, Layak knew that the Emperor’s Children would be beginning their first task in this murder. In the bowels of ships, the flesh of thousands of slaves began to feel the caress of a myriad of tools as their blood flooded with sensation enhancers. Sounds rose from them, each mouth an instrument in a symphony of agony. Machines of silver and chromed steel caught the sound, split it, channelled it through pipes and through devices made to designs that had broken the minds of their makers. The sounds stretched, feeding back on themselves, so that the screams of the slaves began to shatter their skulls and vibrate the flesh from their bones. Mists of pain began to form in the warp around them as their souls were stretched between living and dying. The sound-smiths listened to the deluge of noise in their amplification cradles, the colour of their armour swirling in time to its texture. Then, when it had reached the edge of perfection, they released it. Vox-shunts began to burn out as the cacophony spread across the orbital vox. Fifty yards from Layak, the gunship touched the soil of Ullanor. Hatches opened. Warriors in jet-black armour poured from within, flowing out into a wide circle.
Eidolon shifted stance, head cocked as though listening. The sacs on his neck rippled and pulsed.
‘Our ships are reading a large force of ships approaching from sunward,’ he hooted, turning to look at the two primarchs.
Fulgrim’s smile broadened.
‘My guess would be that it is one or more of our esteemed brothers.’
‘They will not be able to hear or see what happens here,’ said Lorgar, his voice as devoid of emotion as his expression. ‘Identify them, and send the signal as prepared. It will be truth soon enough.’
They looked back to the black gunship as the nose ramp opened. Three figures came from the gunship’s mouth: Kibre in polished jet, his eyes moving over the surroundings; Aximand in sea-green, his flayed and restitched face set in an expression like thunder; and last the figure of Tormageddon, its face hidden by a horned helm, its aura a black banner dragged behind it. Layak could feel the emotions bubbling and fizzing into the ether from the two mortal warlords, like lightning searching for a path to the ground. They would have given him pause, if it had not been for the figure who came after them.
Horus, Warmaster of the Imperium, Anointed of the Pantheon, stepped into the light.
‘Lorgar,’ said Horus as he walked from the gunship. Kibre followed in his wake, the mace Worldbreaker held before him. But for all the Widowmaker’s transhuman power, he was a mote of fire dragged behind a comet.
Horus Lupercal filled Layak’s sight, pulling in his senses, shredding every other detail so that he and only he filled the world.
Armour of night…
Cloak of spilling fire…
Blades of starlight…
The sight struck like a physical blow. Layak felt his mind turning and turning again, tumbling like leaves caught in a blast wave. Darkness snapped and coiled in the Warmaster’s shadow. The ground beneath his tread became black glass, became a cracked mirror, became obsidian. His face was shining, the features like a burn left on the retina and mind.
The throng of warriors gathered behind Lorgar and Fulgrim shrank back, Emperor’s Children and Word Bearers alike falling to their knees.
‘Stand,’ said Horus, and the word pulled the warriors to their feet.
Fulgrim slid to the side, bowing his head, his white hair falling across his face. Layak could feel the tethers he had bound to the daemon primarch’s soul dig deep as it screamed to be released. Lorgar had bowed his head, his hands rested on the grip of his mace, its head resting at his feet.
‘Brother,’said Horus.
Lorgar was looking up, a tranquil smile on his face.
Layak spun a fragment of will in his mind. Fulgrim’s hands ghosted to the handles of his swords. The air around the dais was taut. The mask was flaying his face, spikes burrowing into his flesh, as though it were trying to dig itself through his skull. Behind them the ranked warriors stood beneath the grey sky. Rain was dancing on the black armour of the Justaerin, droplets exploding in silver shards.
This cannot work, said a voice in Layak’s mind, a voice that was at once his own and was not. Lorgar was wrong.
‘My Warmaster,’ Lorgar was saying, and Layak saw Horus raise his hand as though in beneficent greeting. The world was fractured, images passing with the stuttering seconds. Lorgar still and Eidolon looking on with cold eyes. Fulgrim looked at Layak, hate burning from the gaze.
It was now. It would have to be now. One instant. One perfect instant of betrayal.
Fulgrim would strike. Then Lorgar would open his mind. The blood and bone that Lorgar had salted into the earth in a ritual octed would hear that last votive voice, and the dead souls and lost voices of the warp would rise and drown Horus, and then Lorgar would strike a last, final blow with the words of the gods on his lips. The Sons of Horus on the planet’s surface would be slaughtered by Fulgrim’s children. Those in orbit would be given a choice, rise in glory or die in vain. The other Legions would come, and they would see that the Warmaster had fallen, and they would kneel to the Voice of the Gods.
‘You are left with one thing that means that you are not a slave,’ said the remembered voice of Actaea, but for a moment it seemed as though it were real, as though it were speaking the words to him. ‘You have a choice.’
‘The gods must triumph, and Horus will not give them victory,’ Lorgar had said. ‘Another must take his place…’
But if the Warmaster does not fall, said the voice of his thoughts.
Horus was reaching out, his hand raised as though to bless or embrace Lorgar.
Layak bowed his head. His will formed and hardened. Fulgrim thrashed against the binding. Horus rises.
The Warmaster’s blow struck Lorgar in the chest, and lifted him off the ground.
The world blinked. Light flashed out. Shadows fled.
Armour cracked. Blood touched the air in pinprick droplets.
Lorgar tumbled back from Horus’ hand.
Fulgrim froze. Everything froze. Stillness spread in a blast wave. Lorgar struck the ground. Shattered stone fountained up. Layak watched. The threads of Fulgrim’s name were silent in his mind. His mask was cold against his face.
Horus lowered his hand. His face was set, features chiselled by shadow. Kibre stood close behind him, Worldbreaker held in both his hands. Lorgar tried to rise to his knees, mouth opening. Horus half turned and took his mace from Kibre. He turned and swung in a single movement. The blow was slow, unhurried, carrying the contempt of a living god touching a mortal. The mace’s power fields were not active, its weight cold. It struck Lorgar in the chest and snapped his head up as he flew back, twisting, blood gasping from between shattered teeth. Horus stood, the mace held casually at his side, his presence towering like a thundercloud, roaring with silence.
Through the eyes of his mask Layak saw the sight of the Warmaster flicker, blinking between images: a towering figure of black shadow, face lit by ghost-light; a warlord clad in wolfskins, his hands and face red with blood; a king cloaked in sable and crowned with burning laurels; a cloaked prince in pearl-white and gold plate. Each image slid into being and away, each as real as the one that had just passed.
Lorgar began to rise. His aura was a spinning cloud of wounded-red and fever-yellow. Mocking, impious faces grinned from the ether. Blood was running from the corners of his eyes as he looked at Fulgrim, but the Prince of Pleasure did not move. Fulgrim laughed, and Layak felt the sound as the caress of a thousand razors on the inside of his skull. Lorgar looked at Layak.
Layak looked back into the eyes of the being that had broken his soul and made him a slave. And shook his head.
Lorgar’s mouth opened to shout. Layak could feel his lord’s mind reach for the warp, desperate, clawing, screaming.
Horus stepped forwards. A wave of force flipped Lorgar through the air and onto his back. Layak could see the currents of the ether draining away from around his primarch. His aura was withering to tatters of white shock. But he was still a primarch, his flesh forged by secrets known only to the false god who made him. He forced himself to rise. Horus struck him across the back. Crimson armour cracked, and Lorgar slammed down into the ground. Horus kicked him, once, the movement a ripple of strength and a shrug of mental power. Lorgar flipped over onto his back. Horus lowered Worldbreaker to rest on Lorgar’s chest.
‘You injure me, brother,’ said Horus. His voice was low, calm.
‘I serve–’
‘You are faithless. You covet what is not yours and cannot be yours. You undo all that you have done.’
Lorgar looked up at the Warmaster.
For a moment Layak thought he would protest, but then Lorgar stilled, his features hard and calm beneath the running blood.
‘You are flawed. You will falter, and the gods will abandon you.’
‘But I do not go to make an empire for the gods, brother. I am Warmaster – the gods bow to me, and all will kneel and know that I am their saviour.’
Lorgar laughed, the sound chill.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, they will not.’
Horus looked at him for a long moment, then raised Worldbreaker. Cords of telekinetic force pulled Lorgar up. A haze of heat surrounded the primarch.
‘You wish to take this power from me…’ said Horus, and reached out with his talon. The blade-fingers were white slits in the world. Lorgar’s mace rose from the ground where it had fallen. Dust fell from its head as it dragged free and arced to fall beneath Lorgar’s feet. ‘Then take it, brother.’
Lorgar looked at the fallen mace. Layak was still, half his mind willing the primarch to take up the weapon, the rest screaming for him to leave it on the ground. He was breathing hard. His skin was pale, the veins clear and dark beneath.
‘In the ashes of Monarchia, did our father give you such a chance?’ said Horus. ‘Come, pick it up. Kill the master you call weak. The gods are watching, Lorgar. I can feel them waiting.’ Lorgar raised his eyes, straightening. Layak could barely look at Horus now. There was just a void, a screaming wound in reality. He could see the Warmaster though, as if a different image were reaching his mind without his eyes.
‘I…’ Lorgar’s voice was a dry rasp. ‘I… pity you.’
‘If you will not fight for your beliefs,’ said Horus, ‘then you will kneel.’
Lorgar bent, invisible forces pulling him down until his forehead touched the blackened marble. Horus raised Worldbreaker above his head.
Lorgar tensed.
Horus paused. Layak thought he saw the ghost of an expression flicker across Horus’ face, as though for an instant something drowned had floated to the surface of a storm-churned sea.
‘Oh, please kill him,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Please, this is just too wonderfully cruel to be allowed to continue.’
‘Silence,’ said Horus, still looking down at Lorgar. Fulgrim’s laughter vanished. Horus lowered his mace. For a second, Layak thought Horus looked as he had when he last stood on this world, not a shadow of power but a warrior who was greater than any man but less than a god: terrifying and noble.
‘Go,’ said Horus. Lorgar did not move. Layak saw Falkus Kibre glance at Horus Aximand, puzzlement flashing over their faces. ‘If you enter my presence again, the judgment I withhold shall fall upon you.’ Still, Lorgar did not move. ‘Go!’ roared Horus, and the shout echoed out across the plateau like a peal of thunder.
Lorgar rose to his feet and looked as though he were going to say something, but then turned away.
‘What of his warriors?’ growled Falkus Kibre from next to his lord.
Horus turned to look at the ranks of crimson legionaries waiting on the plains below. Then he turned and looked at Layak. Behind the Crimson Apostle, the five thousand warriors of the Unspeaking watched. He thought of all that had been done to him, all that had been taken from him, all that he had done and become in the service of gods that he had never chosen.
Lorgar had turned to look at Layak. Stone dust had smudged parts of the primarch’s crimson armour to grey.
‘You are left with one thing that means that you are not a slave – you have a choice.’
In his mind he let go of the syllables of Fulgrim’s name and felt the bonds holding the daemon’s will break. The Prince of Pleasure gasped, a sound of exultation and pleasure, then lashed forwards, faster than a lightning strike. Blood gushed from Lorgar’s cheek as he fell back to the ground. Fulgrim coiled above him, looking down smiling, raising his clawed hand to lick his brother primarch’s blood from his clawed fingers.
‘You should never let someone else bear a burden you are afraid of, Lorgar,’said Fulgrim. ‘It has a habit of creating resentment.’
Layak looked up from Lorgar to Horus. Slowly, each limb and joint moving with considered care, Zardu Layak knelt.
‘My Warmaster,’ he said. Behind him, thousands of crimson warriors fell to their knees.
A high, shrill chuckle cut the air as Fulgrim began to laugh.

After Argel Tal's obedience, it was refreshing to see Zardu Layak making a choice against Lorgar's will. Lorgar's plan looked pretty good though, and one can appreciate the Emperor's Children creativity in disrupting fleet communications. Also, love that French decided to include a little easter egg from the Black Legion series.

>They were weak. They were compromised. Their will to fight was gone, their defences were falling open.
They had ceased to believe, that was the problem for as long as they had been able to think that something was coming to rescue them, or that their enemies would somehow fall apart of their own accord, they had stood up and fired back. Now, though, they abandoned their posts, they ran down the long chasms between the smoke-filled spires, their nerves shot, their spirit broken.
Not his counterparts in the Legiones Astartes, of course. They still held their positions, still made hard work of it, but even they were missing something, ft was as if they fought out of habit, almost - a kind of automatic response. They no longer believed they could alter the result. Even as they had diminished, he had grown, adding to a reputation that had been formidable during the years of the Crusade itself.
Indras Archeta, captain of the Third Company, Sons of Horus, reflected on that for a moment. In his left hand he grasped the neck of an Imperial Fists warrior. In his right hand, his beloved longblade, the one that rippled with beauty and whispered truths to him.
The Space Marine was trying to say something. Archeta lowered his head a little, prepared to indulge him, since he'd fought well enough. 'What's that, eh?' he asked. 'Spit it out.' 'Emperor… damn… your… faithless…'
'Ah, nothing interesting,' said Archeta wearily. He let the warrior's head fall, and severed his neck before it hit the ground. Then he watched the fighter die, slowly, life gushing from the deep wound at his neck, seeping into the chem-saturated earth below.
A Damocles Rhino revved out of the shadows, heading straight for Archeta's location. At the last minute, the command transport shuddered to a halt, the hatch swung open, and a single warrior emerged. He crunched down to the rubble and strode over to Archeta, clenching his fist and extending it in the Legion salute.
'Captain!' he shouted. 'Here already, eh?'
Archeta watched him approach. The warrior was kitted out much as he was - fine artificer-crafted battleplate, long fur-lined cloak, the Eye of Horus on his breastplate. They were equals, the two of them, as far as rank went, but Azelas Baraxa was captain of the Second Company, just one step closer to the master of the Legion. In another time, given the prodigious tally of throats they had cut for the Warmaster, both of them might have expected to have played a part in the Mournival, but in the aftermath of the disaster at the Saturnine Gate there had been little enthusiasm to revive that old convention. What purpose would it have served, now? The Sons of Horus were the creatures of a living god, the warrior-slaves of an immortal deity. You did not advise a god, and you did not seek to give counsel to an immortal. They had all become just soldiers again, the tools required for the task at hand, with the last of their Crusade-era pretensions swept away.
'Aye, we're making good time,' Archeta said passionlessly.
He didn't like Baraxa. The Second Company captain was a visionless soul, wedded to how things had been before the great break with Terra. Like so many of the senior Sons of Horus, Baraxa looked on the gifts of the new dispensation with suspicion, clinging to the way things had been on Cthonia when they had all of them claimed not to believe in such things as gods. When Torgaddon had been slain, the position should have gone to someone with similar gifts, a creature of the gods they now fought for, not another Ezekyle-clone, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the inevitable.
Baraxa came to stand beside him. 'They're broken, brother,' he said. 'The Sanctum is just lying there. Ready to take. And I find I can hardly believe it.'
'It isn't over yet,' Archeta said, not willing to get swept up into euphoria. 'We're being drawn further in - they still have three primarchs in there, somewhere.'
Baraxa laughed. 'So cautious. Bastion Ledge has been breached - you knew that? Three fronts, all converging. They can't handle that.' He drew in a long breath, as if the air was something that might invigorate him rather than tear at his helm's overworked fox-filters. 'Thousands are coming through Mercury Breach alone, every hour now. It's a flood.. The Red Angel is inside, doing what he does best. This is overwhelming. We just need to get there first, now - break the last gate before the World Eaters render it all down to blood-slurry.'
That was indeed the objective. The fragile unity between legions and factions had already broken. What little cohesion remained was contingent on the target before them all - the hated Emperor, the Deceiver and the Cheater of Birthright. Once He was slaughtered, it would all dissolve again. The XVI Legion, greatest of Legions, the ones who had propelled and sustained this thing from the very start, would have to keep things from collapsing, and to do that they had to be in control of the centre, secure within the very same bunkers that they were now trying to prise apart.
'Then he'll need to be back,' Archeta said.
'He already is.'
That was a surprise. 'Abaddon? He's recovered?'
'He was fighting the Apothecaries, they told me, making their lives hell until they did enough to get him back to the front. He's landed at the Eternity Wall, heading for Mercury right now.' Baraxa clapped Archeta on the upper arm. 'It's all we need to finish this. Our leader.' Archeta bristled.
'Our leader is on the Vengeful Spirit!
'Of course. Of course! But then, down here—'
'What does that matter? Ezekyle's just a mortal. Just like us. You should watch where your words take you, Azelas - the Warmaster sees all and hears all.'
Baraxa looked at him for a moment, taken aback. 'And is beloved by all,' he murmured.
'What?'
'Hells, brother, what's chewing at your guts? You should be pleased.' Yes, what was ailing him? Why was he not exultant, relishing the last push into the heart of hypocrisy? He had never withheld his blade hand before, never regretted a kill. The closer he got, though, the more ill humoured he became.
Homs was not with them. Maybe that was it. If Horus trod this ground, here, now, the whole thing would be over in hours. Oh, Archeta knew all the cant that the sorcerers spouted about the great ward-shield, how it kept out those with the greatest gifts, but that barrier was in tatters now. If Angron could somehow rampage his way inside it, then surely the Warmaster could.
As long as Horus remained absent, the fissures in his Legion would grow steadily wider. You would have power brokers like Baraxa whose heads had been turned by the dynamic First Captain. Sycar, the new Master of the Justaerin, was said to be Abaddon's creature too. Maybe Ikari, the muchdisliked captain of the Fourth Company, was also. What would they all do, if Horus never emerged at all? Would they start, steadily, to think about where their loyalties truly lay?
Horus still commanded the allegiance of the Legion, that was true. Some had even begun to talk of him, as Archeta did, as a member of the true Pantheon, something elevated far beyond the merely human and worthy of a more strenuous kind of adulation. But they were all so new, all so callow. The entire leadership layer of the Legion had been scraped away. The old great names - the Torgaddon's, the Kibre's, the Ekaddon's, the Aximand's - they were extinguished. Those that had replaced them, Archeta included, were poor copies, divided among themselves, beginning to doubt and bicker even as the greatest prize of all lay almost within their grasp.
All except Abaddon. He had come through it all, if not unscathed, then still himself, the last link with the heritage of the Luna Wolves.
No surprise, then, that he was listened to more than ever, looked up to by both the newborn and the old hands.
Horus had to come soon. He had to snuff this nonsense out. He had to remind the faithful why they were spilling their blood for him. He had to be the Warmaster. He had, in due course, to be the Emperor.
'Just keen for dais to be over,' Archeta told Baraxa, sheathing his whispering blade and making ready to march again. 'We've destroyed enough. Time to start building again.'
.....

>The enemy was still withdrawing steadily, still overwhelmed by the sheer numbers coming at them, but the terrain slowed everything down for everybody. It was all devastated, all tumbling and crashing inward and sending up thick clouds of toxic ash and dust. The transit arteries were blocked. After every artillery strike it took time to plough through the smouldering remains. At every turn, in that jungle of dilapidation, you were liable to face an ambush, counter-push or suicide strike. Both the Imperial Fists and the Blood Angels were lethally good at that kind of fighting and they knew every inch of the territory they were ceding. They knew where to leave the fragmentation charges, the antipersonnel mines, the booby-trapped hatches that would send an advancing squad plummeting down into the waterlogged vaults below.
Still, it was a game that the Sons of Horus could play, too. Archeta had fought his way through a thousand cityscapes across both the Crusade and the Rebellion, and success always followed the same pattern: keep pressing, keep pushing, keep the infantry and armour together, watch your flanks and don't get careless. Fast-moving warfare was exhilarating in its own way, but this heavy attrition, this slow grind of strangulation, it had its own attractions.
'Captain,' came a priority signal across his helm's secure feed.
It was Beruddin, captain of the Fifth Company. Archeta signalled for his own squad to keep moving, then slid further down into the lee of the muddy crater-lip.
'Captain,' he replied. 'How goes it?'
'Slow. Bloody. Satisfying.'
Archeta smiled. Beruddin was a warrior after his own heart. 'You'll be with us, then?'
Their two companies were due to rendezvous thirty kilometres further in, just in sight of the already shelled Field of Winged Victory, the muster-point for the combined push into the Palatine.
'Negative. Not unless you pull back now.'
He didn't like the sound of that. 'My orders are—'
'Sigismund, brother. Sigismund. He's been sighted, Mercury section. They lost a whole battalion with Reaver support down there, and it's got Legion command spitting bile. There's some life in this band of wastrels yet.'
Sigismund. One of the mere handful of names that could be spoken of with unfeigned respect across any Legion, in any faction. It had been rumoured by some that his powers were waning, that he'd lost his nerve under the suffocating control of his primarch. No one wanted that to be true. You wanted to kill a beast at the apex of its power, just to show yourself what you could do. Such things mattered. They were the things that enabled a commander to rise through the ranks, to control the loyalty of the line troops, to alter the balance of power within a Legion.
'I'm within sight of the muster,' Archeta said, though without conviction. His mind was already racing. Baraxa, who had pushed ahead hard, might reach Palatine ahead of him. 'I still need to get to—'
'Listen. Ezekyle is already inside the Ultimate Wall. They say he's claiming his way across territory faster than anything that's ever lived. He wants the kill. He can get it. But we're closer, my brother. We're much closer, and we deserve it more, don't you think?'
Why wasn't this coming from the primarch? Hells, where was he? Why were they squabbling over prizes like gangers, when they should have been marching united in the shadow of his fur-lined cloak?
Still, Beruddin made a point. They were closer. And they had been bleeding for this battle, all while the First Captain had still been licking his wounds from the Saturnine debacle.
'It's important. That he doesn't do it. You see that? They're already calling him Legion Master. Some openly - the blasphemy of it. So it can't be him - someone has to stand up.'
That was all true. And it was a better reason to change course now.
'You have a loc-reading?' he asked.
Laughter at the end of the feed. 'Don't need one! He's the only resistance between here and the Palatine. Everyone's after him - to join him, or to take him down. Come, brother. We need to be there.'
Archeta looked up. His tac-reading showed that his Spartans were almost in position. The Blood Angels were in full retreat now, leaving the bodies of their slain behind them. Even so, this front would take hours, maybe days, to reduce. It would be hard, thankless work, all of it in the shadow of the Great Potential Kill.
And when you put it like that, there was really no choice to be made at all.
'My sincere thanks, brother,' he said, stowing his bolter and readying to give the command. 'I'll give the order as soon as we're done here. We'll hunt him together.'
'For the honour of the Warmaster!'
Archeta smiled. 'Aye, that's right,' he said dryly. 'For the honour of Horus.'
.....

>So some were still willing to stand up, to push back. Archeta was almost glad of it, though it slowed everything up, just when they needed to gain the last thrust of momentum.
Beruddin had been right - a kernel of resistance had been uncovered, an ingot of iron amid a world of pliant flesh. The XVI Legion forward units rushed towards it, diverting squads from a dozen objectives. Whole battalions from other Legions shifted course too, weary of merely killing, looking for a proper fight.
The effect worked the other way, too. Archeta had already marvelled at how easily some of the enemy formations had crumbled under assault. Many of those must simply have been weak and demoralised, but more than one of them, it now seemed, had picked up the same tidings he had - a leader is among us, someone is fighting back - and had abandoned their positions in order to join the resurgence.
And so, for all the Legion discipline, for all the great strategic visions of their commanders, a significant chunk of troops on both sides of the struggle had proved willing to make their way towards where the action was at its greatest, to where glory could be won. They were soldiers on the outside, but warriors at heart.
How far have we really travelled? Archeta thought to himself as he ran. How different is this to what we did in the old slum-hives back home?
Not very, was the answer.
So why do it? Why care so deeply about this war, when in essence it was just like all the others?
Archeta smiled to himself. Because names would be made, here. After the guns had fallen silent at last, you had better be able to say that you had done something good, something worth boasting about when the primarch finally stirred himself to making enquiries. There would be more fights to come, this time within the Legion, establishing who was up and who was down, so best to build a reputation while you had the chance.
He dropped down to his knees for a moment, breathing hard. He was deep within the honeycomb debris-piles of a demolished causeway. Its supporting pillars were still partially intact, rising a hundred metres above him like exposed ribs. Cliff-face buildings reared away on either side, all smouldering. A pair of downed Stormbirds framed his view ahead, their carcasses forming a triangular opening through which his brothers had been ordered to push on.
Just getting here had been an achievement. They had cut their way through a full battalion of Blood Angels, supported by an Imperial Fists siege squad and the remains of an Imperial Army mobile infantry regiment. Those warriors must have been part of the Black Swords offensive - they had fought with a kind of grim purpose he hadn't encountered until then. They weren't fighting for victory any longer, seeking to take and hold ground, but merely to deliver pain. They were bitter, nihilistic, spiteful and underhanded.
And that was pretty admirable, all things considered. At least they weren't miming away.
All of that told Archeta that he was getting close.
Once they cleared the oddly sculptural arrangement of burned-out Stormbirds, the ground level ascended steeply, running up a wreckage pile that zigzagged towards the causeway's old terminus. The slope was overlooked on both sides, with high bridges criss-crossing overhead a hundred metres up.
As they advanced for the terminus, bolter fire immediately sprang out from hidden vantage points along the northern edge of the exposed run, striking a brace of Archeta's troops and forcing the rest to drop down.
Archeta signalled to his heavy support. 'Clear this out.'
Missile launchers set further back immediately whooshed out, followed by a percussive drumbeat of heavy bolter shells, obliterating the masonry wall the shooters hid behind. That familiar cushion of blown dust mushroomed across the expanse, filling the chasm from wall-edge to wall-edge. The barrage intensified, chewing through valuable ammunition but pulverising the vista heads and forcing the collapse of a long rockcrete support-pier.
'Now take them.'
As the thick dust still swelled up, Sons of Horus forward units burst out of cover and charged up the slope, using frag grenades to clear the route ahead before moving to secure ground. They went in low and fast, bodies tight to the ground as they ran before unleashing concentrated bolter fire at any sighted target. Archeta came with them, right in the vanguard, sprinting as fast as he could to make the next vantage, his bolt pistol kicking in his grip.
The effect on the defenders was overwhelming, the kind of shock-attack tactics the Legion had used throughout the Crusade - hard to fight back when your surroundings had been blasted into powder around you.
Except that they did fight back. Somehow, they emerged out of the flying debris already firing. They were black-armoured, all of them, multiple squads wading through the shrapnel and picking their targets. The air filled with the whistle and whine of a thousand mass-reactive shells, followed by the clang and echoing crack of their detonations.
'Drive them back!' he cried, determined not to drop away into yet another holding pattern. He lashed out furiously, breaking the blade of another black-armoured fighter and sending him tumbling, where a volley of shells finished him off.
He reached the foot of metal stairs leading up to what had been the terminus command tower, flanked on either side by heavy rockcrete piers. The terrain around him was cluttered with machine parts - axles, wheels, tank tracks - all piled up like some conqueror's heap of skulls.
But then, just before it happened, he realised what he had done. He got the warning tingle, like an electric field across his back - the old ganger instincts that had been with him long before his ascension. Before he could call out a warning, the heaps of machine parts were thrust aside and sent sailing down the slope, bounding and thudding. Dozens of loyalists erupted from underneath them. Some were Blood Angels by their pauldron marks, some were Imperial Fists, but the grime had made them all as black as soot, set into stark relief by the flares of their disruptors.
Then the fighting really started. Archeta needed to give no orders - his vanguard hurled themselves at the enemy, pivoting instantly to take them on. Those corning on behind redoubled their efforts to reach the terminus, knowing that this was now in the balance.
He despatched the first enemy to reach him, slashing wildly with his hissing blade. Only as he moved to meet the next one did he see how far he'd come.
The fighter before him was an Imperial Fist, but arrayed in the coal-black armour of their Templar Brethren order. Something about his presence gave his identity away even before he'd laid eyes on the sword itself. Something about the way he carried himself, his stature, his movements - every figure around him unconsciously reacted to him, so that when he moved, they all moved too, like planets around a sun. His recklessly open stance might have been arrogant in any other fighter, but with him it merely fitted the aura he projected, one of complete and total focus, of immersion into the art of the blade to such an extent that no other way of being made any kind of sense at all. He strode across the wreckage in perfect silence, moving through it like a predator, his longsword eating up the meagre light and dragging it down into nothingness.
Archeta felt a spike of joy.
'The Black Sword,' he murmured, dropping into an attack stance even as his own blade screamed with hatred. 'I did not expect to come across you so —'
He never saw the blow coming. It smacked in transverse, so strong so fast, smashing through his guard and knocking his whole body out of line. And then the follow-up, liquid like oil, punching up, cutting in, unbelievably powerful. The hilt cracked against his helm, running him, then a point first ram of the blade, two-handed, a wn nih, and blood was everywhere. The last thing he saw was a pair of red lenses swinging round at him, the ebon blade whistling for his neck, his parry nowhere near being close enough lo —
Sigismund gave the decapitated body a brief glance as it crashed to the earth. Before he could press on, Rann, having despatched his own opponent, looked down at it too.
'A captain,' he noted, impressed. 'Who, though?'
By then, Sigismund was marching down the slope to take on the rest.
'No idea,' he said. 'Keep moving.'

Archeta's perspective gives some interesting glimpses into the state of the Sons of Horus by the end of the Siege, still formidable, but suffering from the years of war: upper echelon slaughtered thanks to Saturnine gambit, their replacements bickering with each other; rising factionalism, those who accept gifts of Chaos, and even starting to view Horus himself as a god vs conservatives, viewing Abaddon as their banner and even calling him legion master, despite Horus still drawing breath; expected conflicts with their allies, pushing the need to capture the vital positions to get the upper hand over them in the future, on top of upcoming disputes in the Legion itself; declining discipline, with objectives being abandoned for personal glory. You can already see the signs of their, and the other Chaos legions, future, even if it's not as bad as it will become by 40k.
Also, an interesting highlight of the effect Sigismund has on the loyalists once he receives the Black Sword: where once they were crumbling and despairing, he infested them with same zeal, pushing them onward.

>Skarr-Hei was losing his grip. Skarr-Hei was becoming just a part of the whole, a fleck of fire on the orb of sun-fire. Skarr-Hei had to keep killing to keep the pain at bay, though you never really lost the pain, it only changed character - sometimes a goad, sometimes a reminder, sometimes like an old friend that you felt you needed even though nothing good ever came of knowing him.
The enemy weren't worth noticing They were buckling, and had been running ever since the breakthrough at Mercury. Skarr-Hei had heard that Titans were coming through the gap now, a monumental effort given the huge amount of earth and stone that needed clearing. That wouldn't affect things for a while, though - a Titan would struggle in the cramped and ruined Palace interior, whereas infantry went fast, went hard, swarming across any barrier raised up against them, getting to the blood-spill.
Skarr-Hei had hoped for better fighting, though. He had hoped to find an enemy that would test him, one that would stand up and hammer back at the whirl of chainaxes. Instead, they had died weakly - in clumps, in squads, in droves. The World Eaters' advance was remorseless. They had no heavy armour to back them up this far in, no particular strategies or tactics, just a howling onslaught that burned its way in closer, closer, closer. They killed without compunction, without thought, out of reflex. Their old formations were nothing to them any more, they barely knew one old warrior from the other. Their armour was black-red, plastered with gore and dirt, all of it looking much the same, of a piece with the trenches of loosed flame that licked and rippled across the spoiled earth.
Skarr-Hei ran down a long viaduct with his many battle-brothers, the ashwind tearing at them all. Below was murk and rubbish. Around him were the great towers, rising up through the reeking smog. Ahead was the rising massif of the Sanctum itself, still distant but visible now, ringed with fire and smelling of terror. Even as the embers of his rational mind sank into perpetual red-tinged fury, he still understood that this place was the target, the epicentre of the true pain. It had to be destroyed.
And yet, when they reached the end of the viaduct, at an intersection tower where the ways ahead branched out in all sorts of directions, one of his own Legion was waiting for them, uncharacteristically still His great chainaxe ran with streamers of gore. His bronze helm was splattered with it, his breastplate was covered in it, making the dust coagulate and clump across the ceramite.
Skarr-Hei knew this one. They all knew this one, and by the looks of things he'd been busy. 'My lord Kharn,' Skarr-Hei said, the words slurring through his clogged vox-grille. He came to a halt, as did those around him.
Kharn barely seemed to notice them. He barely seemed aware of any presence, even his own. He was facing north, away from the Sanctum's edge, off into the great cluster of tall spires that broke off from the Palatine urban zone and merged with regions already conquered. His stance was erect, febrile, as if suffused with some kind of electric current.
'I…' he grunted. 'He's… out… there.'
Skarr-Hei listened, but it wasn't easy. He had to keep moving, keep killing. The process had been set in motion now, and what little remained of his rational mind told him that it would never stop, whatever happened here - kill, and kill again, or be lost in futile excruciation. 'What are you saying?' Skarr-Hei tried. The primarch? You've… seen him?'
They all knew Angron was somewhere ahead. Skarr-Hei had heard the bellows from a distance, seen the carnage, but the Legion Master was off on his own, raging in his own private world of slaughter, neither commanding nor commanded, smashing through the unseen barriers against the netherworld. The best you could hope for was to witness it.
At the mention of the name, though, Kharn stirred. His bloody mask turned to gaze on Skarr-Hei. 'Something… worth our time.' His voice was breathy, thick with mucus. 'Something… got up.'
And then Skarr-Hei knew what had distracted him. Some staged fight, some encounter, not allowed to run its natural course, nagging away somewhere in that addled mind. An adversary who had been allowed to escape alive, now out there too, part of the slaughter. 'Who?' he asked.
Kharn struggled to vocalise it. 'The… Black Sword,' he blurted at last.
Skarr-Hei didn't know what that meant. There were a million swords out there, a great number of which were probably black. It wasn't much of a name, and he doubted Kharn would be able to tell him more than that any time soon.
But they had to move. Had to keep going. His own blades were cooling, the blood on them was drying out, the Nails were already spiking.
'We can find him, my lord,' Skarr-Hei said. 'There's no hiding, not now. We can find him.'
And slowly, dimly, Kharn seemed to understand. He nodded. 'You come,' he ordered. He looked at the rest of them. 'You all come.'
Then they were running again, not towards the centre but careering away like a pack of wild dogs, howling, growling, panting with machine-fervour. The movement would stave off the worst of the pain, but they all knew they needed to fight properly soon, to bury their blades into living flesh again, to kill, to maim, to burn.
Kharn led them now, driving them onwards, thick-painted gore flying free of his churning limbs.
'Find… you,' Skarr-Hei heard him mutter, over and over, obsessed now, consumed with it. 'And finish… it.'

>To kill, to kill, to kill.
There might once have been other things, other considerations. Hard to recall.
He remembered his name - Kharn. He remembered where he had been born - here, on Terra. So he was home, back on the soil that had first raised him up, though the place looked a bit different now - like every world he ever conquered, a desolation, fit only for bone fragments and whining ghosts, he would blink, and see the place then as it would become very soon - the great brass thrones in place of cities, the mountains of skulls, the skies of liquid fire. The barrier was so thin, now. Just a few more kills, just a little extra push on the tally of slaughter, and it would break entirely.
So where was Angron, just as the victory hove into view? Where was the gene-father he had coaxed and placated and tried to reason with for so long? Why were the primarchs, those squabbling brothers who had driven so much of this long, long war, suddenly careering out of view, as if embarrassed by their respective excesses?
Lost in madness, they said of Angron. Swallowed up by the permanent rage that had always been his destiny. There would be no more words spoken with him, not any more. He had risen to inconceivable heights, becoming a force of destruction the likes of which the galaxy had never witnessed before. His anger was almost a ritual now, outside time, something that would cycle for eternity. He was capable of anything and everything… except reason. The very thing that separated the humans from the beasts, and he had lost it.
To kill, to kill.
Did he regret the change? Did Kharn, the most faithful of all Angron's sons, wish for things to be different? Maybe. Except that he had never known his master undamaged. He had never seen him in his youth, before the Nails had been inserted, and so his loyalty had always been given to a broken angel. And after that, once he'd been given the same bad medicine as his master, it had been easier just to wash any doubt away with fresh blood. When you killed a man, a woman, a child - when you ended a fragile flame of life, when you took away the chance of any further development, of happiness, of sadness, or selfishness or vice or sainthood or intellect - when you did that, in that one moment, the torment ceased. Just a fragment, an atom of peace amid an eternity of rage. But at the same time, in that fleeting glimpse of sanity, you could recall everything you once were. You could remember discourse, and laughter, even pity. And so you had to start again, to move to the next victim, the next challenge, because that knowledge was the worst goad of all.
To kill.
This hunting ground had been the richest he'd ever encountered. His chainaxe had gorged on the blood of the mortal and the ascended. Some had run from him, some had stood firm. Some had screamed at him in hatred, some had wept from fear. It didn't matter how they died, only that they did. The kill-counter kept on turning, the only certain gauge of his achievement.
He was aware of bodies in motion around him. He judged they were of his own Legion, from the copper stench that came with them. Their old pale armour was now as black as every other surface in this despoiled world, blushed only with the mortal stain of those they had ended. He didn't remember their names, either. He might have even killed some of their battle-brothers, during the worst spells of orgiastic slaughter, but if he had done then no one seemed to hold it against him.
Together, they charged out across the old ruined viaduct, the one that speared right into the heart of the tiny Imperium of Mankind. A realm that had once spanned the stars, reduced to a few square kilometres of crumbling estate, soon to be demolished and refashioned into something more suitable for the Great God's triumph.
But, just then, he didn't care about any of that. He looked out, ahead, through the murk and the mire, his helm display overlaying the night with its redundant skein of runes and markers. He saw a warrior standing tall among other warriors, right up at the terminus of the viaduct's span, his armour as black as his own, withdrawing his blade from the torso of a slain opponent. There was no flourish, no cry of triumph - it was a functional display, just something that needed to be done, but still artful in its spare economy.
The Black Sword had many fighters about him, a whole army, just as Kharn had his warriors by his side. None of those mattered - they were just there to prevent anything getting in the way. For a second, Kharn paused in his headlong run, watching. He saw the Black Sword wave his fighters on, rousing them to more defiance. They were under heavy fire, but still they advanced through it all, dogged and unyielding. He sensed an old memory stir then, a distant recollection of a kind of fellowship under arms. He remembered a pit, and opponents, and fraternal laughter echoing into the high vaults above.
The memory didn't last. He singled out the Black Sword, the one he had come to kill.
'Mine,' he slurred, gesturing with his blood-soaked axe.
The others didn't protest. There was plenty for them, and they still knew just enough to defer to rank. He was Kharn the Loyal, Kharn the Faithful, the one soul capable of holding them all together for just a little longer while their gene-father ran amok. They were running again, the hounds of war, down the slope towards the enemy, no tactics in mind, no objective in sight, save the one goal, the one target that kept them a step away from total dissolution.
To kill, to kill, to kill.

I wanted to post this excerpt as another glimpse into the World Eaters' state by the end of the Siege, and what were the Kharn's thoughts as he run to his second duel with Sigismund. Also, it's ironic to see the mentions of him being only one who could hold the legion together and was called the Loyal and the Faithful.