Glancing back, Grammaticus saw that the drowned boy was gone. But the delay had cost him dearly.

‘Is this when you kill me?’ he asked, still a little shaken but shoring up his composure with each passing second.

‘I should have killed you when I saw you. Tell me this. Is what you said true, does Vulkan still live?’

‘As far as I know–’ Grammaticus’s answer was cut by the report of a bolt pistol.

In front of him, Numeon convulsed as the shell struck him in the torso and punched the Salamander off his feet.

‘You have proven remarkably elusive, John Grammaticus,’ said a cultured, yet terrifying voice. The dull click of a bolt pistol being primed to fire again froze Grammaticus in place. He turned, having made it halfway up the ramp, and saw the Word Bearers cleric drawing down on him. ‘But then you are quite remarkable, aren’t you?’

‘So I’m told,’ he said, fulgurite still in hand.

‘Give the spear to me,’ the Dark Apostle ordered. ‘Throw it onto the ground.’

Numeon was still down and not looking like he was going to get up. Grammaticus obeyed.

‘What now?’

‘Now you will come with me and I shall show you the true meaning of the warp.’

‘I’ll pass if that’s all the same to you.’

‘I didn’t say you had a choice, mortal.’ Elias wagged the pistol’s muzzle, gesturing for Grammaticus to step down from the ramp and out of the gunship’s waiting hold.

He hesitated. ‘I’ll be shredded out there.’

Elias briefly looked at the athame dagger sheathed at his belt.

‘You won’t be out here long enough for that. The shredding comes later, though.’

Grammaticus was taking his first steps back down the ramp, trying desperately to think of a way out of this, when a charge trembled the air. It wasn’t from the lightning field, it was nothing to do with the storm at all. Elias felt it, too, and began to turn.

Something was coming.

Numeon was dying. He didn’t need the failing biometric data relayed by his armour to tell him that. Red warning icons were flashing across his vision, a sputtering, static-crazed feed that did more to impede his senses than enhance them.

He discharged the locking clamps on his helmet and tore it off.

The Word Bearer, the cleric they had been seeking, who had undoubtably killed Hriak, paid him no heed. As he gazed into the storm, Numeon detected a change in the air. He felt heat, and imagined the trembling of atoms as the veil of reality was parting and being rewritten.

He reached out, ostensibly for a weapon, perhaps his pistol, as the glaive was now too far to grasp, but found himself clutching the sigil.

Vulkan’s sigil.

For his legionaries it had become an enigmatic symbol of hope, but for the primarch it held no such mystery. He had crafted it, imbued it with technologies beyond even his Legiones Astartes sons.

It was a beacon, a light to bring a stricken ship to shore or a lost traveller home.

For a few brief seconds the storm abated to a murmur, the last jag of lightning seemingly frozen in place and becoming a tear in reality that exuded light.

Gazing into that light, Numeon saw a figure limned in godlike power.

‘Vulkan lives…’ he breathed, emotion and blood both swelling up into his throat to choke him.

Elias holstered his pistol, realising it would have little effect on whatever was about to emerge into reality. He was reaching for his athame, intent on flight, when he recognised the figure that appeared before him.

‘My master,’ he murmured and fell to one knee, bowing his head before Erebus.

Erebus ignored him. Instead he regarded John Grammaticus, who was still standing on the ramp of the gunship, transfixed by what he had just witnessed.

The traveller was hooded. His dark robes swathed a power-armoured frame. There was no face beneath the cowl, only a silver mask fashioned to resemble one. In one hand Erebus held a ritual knife which he secreted back beneath his robes; the other was bionic, yet to be re-fleshed, and reached to retrieve the fulgurite.

‘Rise,’ he said to Elias, though he was looking at Grammaticus. His voice sounded old, but bitter and filled with the resonance of true power.

‘You have arrived at an auspicious moment–’ Elias began, before Erebus lashed out with the fulgurite and slit the other Dark Apostle’s throat.

‘Indeed I have,’ he said, allowing the blood fountaining from Elias’s ruptured arteries to paint the front of his robes.

Dying, unable to staunch the wound from a god-weapon, Elias was reduced to clawing at his former master. He managed to grasp the silver mask and tear it from his master’s face before Erebus seized his flailing hands and threw him back.

Grammaticus recoiled as Erebus faced him. Something akin to a daemon regarded him, one with a hideous flayed skull, blood-red and patched by scar tissue that wasn’t healing as ordinary flesh and skin. It was darker, incarnadine, and shimmered with an unearthly lustre. Several small horns protruded from his pate, little nubs of sharpened bone.

At Erebus’s feet, Elias was gasping like a fish without water. He was dying. His desperation seemed to draw Erebus’s attention, and Grammaticus was glad those hellish eyes were no longer focused on him.

Crouched down, Erebus addressed his former disciple.

‘You are as stupid as you are short-sighted, Valdrekk.’ He showed him the fulgurite, still glowing slightly, clenched in Erebus’s bionic hand. ‘This does not win wars, mere chunks of wood and metal cannot do that. It was never the weapon you were looking for. The primarchs, the god-born, are the weapons. Sharpen our own, blunt our enemy’s.’

Erebus leaned down and clamped his flesh hand over Elias’s gaping mouth. The struggle was brief and uneventful.

‘He goes to the Neverborn as a reward for trying to betray me.’

It took Grammaticus a couple of seconds to realise that Erebus was talking to him. He looked down and saw the fulgurite brandished towards him.

‘Take it,’ Erebus said. ‘No one will stop you.’ Now he looked up and there was terrible knowledge in his eyes. ‘Go to your task, John Grammaticus.’

Warily, Grammaticus took the spear. He then walked back up the ramp and pressed the icon to close it. When he looked back, both Erebus and Elias were gone.

Although he was no legionary, he could fly the ship. His abilities as a pilot were exemplary and there weren’t many vessels, human or xenos, that he couldn’t fly. Heading across the troop hold, Grammaticus opened the door that would allow him access to the cockpit. It was large, built to accommodate a legionary, but he managed well enough. It took him a few minutes but he got the ship’s systems online for atmospheric flight, and the engine turbines were already warmed up.

Through the glacis plate he noticed the sky over Ranos was changing. There were shapes in the storm clouds now, looming large and too distinct to be merely shadows. Erebus had done more than end the life of a rival when he had killed Elias. Grammaticus wasn’t about to stick around and find out what that was.

Engine ignition sent tremors through the ship as Grammaticus boosted forwards and then started to gain loft. A quick check of the sensor array revealed a path through the scattering of vessels in orbit. None of them were suitable; he’d need to find another space port and gain passage aboard a cruiser, preferably non-military.

It would be guarded, he knew that. But if he got there before Polux, he’d have a much better chance of slipping through their security nets.

Dark sky gave way to desolate, black void as the gunship streaked through the upper atmosphere and beyond.

A reflection in the glacis made Grammaticus start at first, the memory of the drowned boy still all too fresh, but he masked his sudden panic well. The eldar regarded him sternly.

‘You were successful, John Grammaticus?’ asked Slau Dha.