Lorgar screwed up the parchment, destroying the Colchisian cuneiform scripture, and let it fall to the cold ground.

‘Is Magnus here now? Are we here, fifty years from the night I entered the Great Eye?’

Yes. Where we stand now is mere days after something humanity will come to recall as the Razing of Prospero. Magnus fell victim to his own arrogance, and now resides in the tallest tower of his broken city here, lamenting the destruction of his Legion and the death of his hopes. He intended only the best, but his curiosity saw him damned in the eyes of the Emperor. He looked too deep, too long, into ideals the Emperor did not hold.

Lorgar nodded, expecting nothing less. It was hardly unprecedented, after all. His own Legion – a hundred thousand Word Bearers kneeling in the dust of Monarchia…

He shook his head, looking back to the city, and the tower at the heart of it.

‘Why does he come here, to the empyrean?’

To hide where the Emperor’s dogs cannot catch him. He is here to lick his wounds. For his sins, Magnus was sentenced to censure. He chose exile over execution.

Lorgar started walking.

‘I am going to speak with him.’

You will not be allowed to stand before the Crimson King.

He didn’t need to turn to know the daemon was smiling. ‘We will see,’ he called over his shoulder.

There was no answer. Ingethel was gone.

HE WAS THREATENED by an abortion wearing the cardinal red ceramite of the Thousand Sons Legion.

‘Denlcrrgh yidzun,’ it demanded. A bronze bolter was wrapped in the quivering flesh-coloured tentacles it used as arms. Behind this lone sentry, the fallen city wall of Tizca rose in mounds of rubble.

Lorgar breathed a slow exhalation. Even from a dozen metres away, the Thousand Son reeked of spoiled meat and the rich, coppery tang of aetheric secrets. What remained of its face looked as if it’d melted down the front of its skull.

‘I am Lorgar, Lord of the Seventeenth Legion.’ He gestured to the bolter in the thing’s limbs. ‘Lower your weapon, nephew. I am here to speak with my brother.’

Another attempt at speech left the Thousand Son’s ravaged features as a meaningless blur of syllables. It seemed to recognise its own inadequacy in this regard, for a gentle, cultured voice drifted into Lorgar’s mind a moment later.

I am Hazjihn of the Fifteenth Legion. You cannot be what you appear.

Lorgar buried his discomfort beneath his father’s smile. ‘I could say the same words to you, Hazjihn.’ The ground gave a particularly violent shudder. Glass shattered in the lowest levels of the closest pyramid as more rocks tumbled from the ruined city wall.

The Crimson King tells us we are the only human life on this world. Hazjihn’s dripping face snuffed back a mouthful of air in ungainly respiration. You cannot be Lord Aurelian of the Word Bearers.

Lorgar spread his hands in a display of unarmed beneficence. ‘You know me, Hazjihn. Do you recall the evening I lectured on the Khed-Qahir Parables, in the west garden district of the City of Grey Flowers?’

The bolter lowered a fraction. I recall it well. How many of my Legion’s warriors were present that night?

Lorgar nodded in respect to the Thousand Son. ‘Thirty-seven, among a mortal crowd of over twenty thousand.’

The warrior’s sloping eyes blinked slowly. And what is the fiftieth principle of Qahir?

‘There is no fiftieth principle of Qahir, for he died of a consumptive sickness soon after penning the nineteenth. The fiftieth principle of Khed is to maintain cleanliness of flesh and iron as surely as one would maintain purity of soul, for the external inexorably bleeds into the internal.’

The warrior lowered his bolter. You may yet be a deceiver, but I will take you to my lord. He will judge you with his own eye.

Lorgar inclined his head again, this time in thanks. He followed the limping figure of Hazjihn, ascending the mounds of rubble to enter the city proper. The warrior’s halting stride set his armour’s servo joints snarling.

Lorgar watched the warrior’s limping movements. Whatever benefits the mutations offered, they were hidden by the Legion’s armour. Above all, a randomness lay in Hazjin’s corruption. Lorgar couldn’t help contrast it to the shaped, lethal warping of Argel Tal in his previous vision. His own son’s alterations had all the hallmarks of malicious intent, as if a greater intellect had kneaded the Word Bearer’s flesh, rewriting his life at the genetic level, crafting him into a living engine of war.

Hazjihn’s mutation showed no such design. If anything, he seemed diseased.

‘Nephew,’ Lorgar kept his voice soft, ‘what has happened to you? How many of my brother’s sons are as changed as you are?’

Hazjihn didn’t look back. This place, this world, it has altered so many of us. The Powers bless us, my lord.

Blessed. So the daemon Ingethel had spoken the truth: physical considerations faded when one embraced union with the gods. With psychic mastery and the ascension of consciousness to immortal levels, evidently the struggles of the flesh were increasingly irrelevant. Perhaps it made a sick kind of sense: when one was omnipotent, functions of the flesh hardly mattered. Power to such a degree overshadowed lesser concerns.

Yet even for one who prided himself on his enlightened perspective, it was a bitter pill for Lorgar to swallow. The truth may be divine, but that hardly rendered it any more appealing to the human race. Some truths were too ugly to be easily embraced.

A rancid, unwanted smile claimed his mouth for a moment. It would be a crusade, then. Another crusade to bring the truth to the masses at the point of a sword.

Humanity would never, could never, be relied upon to reach its own enlightenment. He found it the sorriest, saddest aspect to the species.

‘How long have you been here, Hazjihn?’

Some of us insist it has been months. Others claim mere days have passed. We cannot record the time accurately, for it flows in all directions. Chronometers dance to tunes of their own devising.The warrior made a strangled gargle, approaching a laugh. However, the primarch tells us mere days have passed in the material realm.

Lorgar.Ingethel’s voice, not Hazjihn’s. Turn back. This future is not yours to see.

The primarch held his tongue as they walked into Tizca, the City of Light.

AS HE LOOKED upon Magnus, Lorgar reconciled logic with emotion, forging both into understanding. This was not the Magnus he knew – this was Magnus five decades older.

In fifty years, he had aged a hundred. The Crimson King had abandoned the pretension of armour, clad now in nothing more than divine light that left aching after-images in the minds of all who looked upon him. Yet beneath the psychic grandeur, a broken brother stared at Lorgar’s arrival. His remaining eye showed little of its former pearlescent gleam and his features, never those of a handsome man, were now cracked by time’s lines and the ravines of tortured thought.

‘Lorgar,’ the figure of Magnus said, breaking the library’s stillness and silence. The witchlight roiling from him in waves illuminated the scrolls and books lining the walls.

The Word Bearer entered slowly, his purring armour joints adding to the breach of silence. Standing too near Magnus bred a painful tingling behind the eyes, as if white noise had evolved into a physical sensation. Lorgar turned his gentle gaze aside, taking in his brother’s collection of writings. Immediately, his glance fell upon one of his own books – An Epilogue to Torment– written the very same year he had won the crusade against the Covenant’s old ways on Colchis.

Lorgar traced a gloved fingertip down the book’s leather spine. ‘You do not seem surprised to see me, brother.’

‘I am not.’ Magnus allowed himself a smile. It only deepened the lines marring his face. ‘This world holds endless surprises. What game is this, I wonder? What incarnated hallucination am I addressing this time? You are a poor simulacrum of Lorgar, spirit. Your eyes do not burn with the fire of a faith only he and his sons understand. Nor do you bear the same scars.’