‘Guilt! I am your guilt made manifest, Vulkan. You can’t escape me because I live in you.’

Trying not to listen, I started to examine the cell. It was circular, the metal used in its construction thick and impenetrable to my fists alone. But it was made in sections, and each of those was betrayed by a welding line that yielded a shallow lip. Fifty metres straight up. I couldn’t jump that distance, but I might be able to climb it. As my lucidity returned, so too did my capacity to plan and strategise. I put those gifts to work on my escape.

An oubliette is a hole, a dungeon in which people are thrown and forgotten about. This was what Curze had done. He had left me in a hole, beaten me, cut me and assumed I would break, that my mind would shatter and I would be forever lost.

Curze was not Nocturnean. Nostramans did not possess our pride, our determination, our endurance.

‘Despair’ was not a word we recognised, nor was ‘submission’.

Purpose providing me with newfound strength, I seized my chains. The iron felt rough against the palms of my hands as my grip tightened. Muscles bunched in my neck, hardened over my shoulders and back. Threads of sinew stood out on my blacksmiter’s chest, cord thick and straining against the chains. And as I pulled, the links began to stretch and open, slowly yielding to my might. With a supreme effort, as much will as it was strength, I wrenched the chains apart and broke them. Each and every one, until their fragments lay scattered upon the cell floor.

Ferrus sneered; I could almost hear his lip curling, ‘So, you are free of those chains. So what? You are weak, Vulkan. And because you are weak, you will fail. Just as you failed me, just as you failed your Legion.’

I stopped for a moment, and bowed my head to remember the fallen.

Nemetor, cradled in my arms…He had been the last.

‘I did not fail you, brother.’

Pressing a hand against the cell wall, I felt for imperfections in the metal, the smallest handhold I could exploit.

The voice behind me interrupted my planning.

‘Do you want to know how I died, brother?’

I did not turn this time, for I had no wish to see the thing that had somehow crept inside my thoughts and was trying to unman me.

My reply was caustic. ‘You are not my brother. Now, shut up!’

Ferrus’s voice grew lower, more sinister, ‘Do you want to know what I realised at the very moment of my death?’

I paused, and cursed myself inwardly for doing it.

‘I bested him, you know. Fulgrim, I mean.’

Now I turned. I couldn’t help it. Deep down, a part of me must have suspected this, otherwise how could this apparition speak to me of it? ‘He was your slayer?’

Ferrus nodded slowly, as a smile crept up over his lips like a spider crawling across a weed.

‘He was.’

‘You hated him, didn’t you? For his betrayal, for the bond of friendship he broke.’

‘We were once very close.’

I felt the weight of the chains anew, their paltry fragments dragging me down like an anchor into the abyssal deep of an ocean. Darkness lingered here in this trench of the mind, all-consuming and endless. I knew that I was succumbing to something – that my will, not my strength, was being tested, and I wondered again at the nature of the darkness in this place that I could not see through it. That I was blind like any mortal man would be.

‘Yes – you are, brother,’ said Ferrus, causing me to start when I realised he had read my thought and turned it to his own ends. ‘Blind, I mean. Blinded to truth, by so-called enlightenment.’ Ferrus’s smile reached his eyes, and it was hideous to behold. All light was drawn to them, devoured by those deadened orbs as a black hole devours a sun. ‘You know of what I speak.’

‘You said you defeated him.’ I felt a weight upon my back, pressing me down to my haunches.

‘I did. I had him at my mercy, but Fulgrim,’ said Ferrus, whilst shaking his head, ‘was not all he appeared to be. You know of what I speak,’ he repeated, and my mind was cast back to when I saw Horus for that second time, when I felt the nature of the power he had cloaked himself with. I could not put a name to it, to this presence, this primordial fear, but knew that Ferrus spoke of the same thing.

He leaned back to expose the neck wound. ‘He cut off my head, slew me in cold blood and left my Legion shattered. You failed me, Vulkan. I needed you at my side, and you failed me. I asked you–’ Ferrus grew angry, ‘–no, I beggedyou to follow me, to stand by my side!’

I stood, the weight leaving me, the chains losing their power to drag me down into the dirt, into this dark hollow with only an apparition and my eventual madness to keep me company.

‘You lie,’ I told the spectre. ‘Ferrus Manus would not beg. Not even for that.’

I turned back to the wall, took hold as my fingers pressed into the metal, and began to climb.

‘You will fail!’ Ferrus raged below me. ‘You are weak, Vulkan! Weak! You’ll perish in this place and no one will ever know your fate. Unmourned, your statue will be shrouded. Your Legion will diminish and die, lost like the others. Unspoken of, unwanted, a cautionary tale for those that remain behind to spit on your unworthy ashes. Nocturne will burn.’

One hand over the other, I kept on climbing.

‘Shut up, brother.’

Ferrus had never been this talkative before; I wondered why in my subconscious he was now. It was guilt, and the slow erosion of my resolve, that provided his words. They were my words, my fear.

‘I am starting to understand, Curze,’ I muttered, finding all the imperfections in the metal with my fingertips, rising like a feline predator from my prison.

I slipped, fell a half-metre, my knuckles scraping against the wall, but managed to grip where one of the weld points jutted almost imperceptibly in a shallow lip of metal. No one berated me or willed my death. I glanced down.

Ferrus was gone. For now at least.

Making sure of my grip, I set my mind to the task ahead.

Above me, with every painstaking metre I climbed, the oval of light that cast down into my cell widened.

Once I neared the end of the shaft, no more than two metres from the summit, I stopped and waited. Listened.

Two voices, low and grating, emanated from above. The rough tonality came from vox-grilles. Curze had positioned two guards to watch my cell. I briefly wondered if they were amongst the legionaries who had stabbed me so grievously before. I could still feel the presence of the blades as they pierced my body, but it was a phantom pain and no scars marred my skin other than those rendered by the branding iron.

During the Great Crusade, there were few occasions I could remember when the VIII and XVIII Legions had fought together on campaign. Kharaatan was the last time, and that hadn’t ended well for me or Curze. Whatever bonds of loyalty I felt towards him, whatever fraternal love and respect I might have borne for him, ended on Kharaatan. What he did there… What he made me do…

I shuddered, and one of the guards laughed in such a way as to suggest the nature of their discussion: death and torture, and how they had meted it out to those weaker and smaller than them. Murderers, rapists, thieves, the children of Nostramo came from spoiled stock.

I felt my anger boil, but kept my fury in check. This needed to be swift, silent.

From the resonance of their footfalls against the metal floor, I gauged each legionary’s position relative to the opening of the shaft. One was close by – bored, as he shifted around often. The other was farther away, perhaps a few metres between each warrior. Neither of them was watching the opening. I suspected they thought I was dead or dying. Certainly, they had plunged enough steel in me to see it done.

I am a primarch, and we do not die easily… or well, I reminded myself, thinking of poor Ferrus. And for a moment, I felt his presence again below me, but he did not stir or speak.