Enough!

Three of the paintings burst into flame; the crystal sculpture of the Covenant’s tower palace shattered into worthless glass chips. Lorgar winced at his brother’s psychic release. He had to sniff blood back into his nose.

I am finished with this petty banter. You believe you know the truths behind our reality? Then show me. Tell me what you saw at the end of your accursed Pilgrimage.

Lorgar rose to his feet, extinguishing the small fires with a gentle gesture. Frost glinted on his fingernails as the flames hissed into nothingness, starved of air. For a moment he felt a twinge of regret, that he and his closest brother should be reduced to this.

But time changed all things. He was no longer the lost one, the weak one, the one brother plagued by doubt.

Lorgar nodded, his eyes thinned to dangerous slits.

‘Very well, Magnus.’

PART TWO

THE PILGRIM

FOUR

A DEAD WORLD

Shanriatha

Forty-three years before Isstvan V

HE TOOK HIS first steps onto the world’s surface, hearing the soft percussion of his steady breathing within the enclosed suit of armour. Targeting cross hairs moved over the emptiness in a sedate drift, while the delicate electronics of his retinal display listed his own bio-data in ignorable streams.

Slowly, he moved into the wind. Dust crunched underfoot, soil so absolutely dead and dry that it defied the possibility of life. His musings were accompanied by the rattle of grit in the breeze, clattering against his thrumming armour plating.

For just a moment, he turned and looked back at his gunship. The racing winds were already painting it with a fine layer of the powdery red dust that existed in abundance on this world.

This world. He supposed it had once possessed a name, though it had never been spoken by human lips. Its bleak, rusty desolation reminded him of Mars, though Terra’s sister world was a bastion of industry with few wild lands remaining. It also laid claim to calmer skies.

He didn’t look up; he didn’t need to, for there was nothing new to see. From horizon to horizon, a blanket of tortured clouds bubbled and churned, thunderheads crashing together to make tides of white, violet, and a thousand reds.

The warp. He’d seen it before, but never like this. Never around a world. Never in place of true weather. Never crashing through thousands of solar systems in a migraine tide, like a nebula rotting in the void.

Lorgar,said a genderless, breathless voice behind him, from a place where no one had been a moment before.

He didn’t spin to face it, nor did he bring his weapon to bear. Instead, the primarch turned slowly, his eyes laden with patience and a bright, too-human curiosity.

‘Ingethel,’ he greeted the aberration. ‘I have sailed into the mouth of madness. Now tell me why.’

INGETHEL SLITHERED CLOSER. Its claim to a humanoid form ended at its waist, which became the thick, ridged tail of a deep-sea worm or serpent. Mucous membranes along its underside were already coated with dust. Even its torso was human in only the loosest sense: four skeletal arms reached from its shoulders, in divine mockery of some ancient Hindusian deity, and its skin was a grey, mottled spread of dry leather.

Lorgar,it said again. Malformed teeth clacked together as the creature’s jaw chattered. What had once been the face of a human female was now a bestial ruin – all fangs and dusty fur, with a leonine mouth that couldn’t close around its deformed dental battlements. One eye stared, swollen and ripe with blood, bulging from its socket. The other was a sunken, useless nugget half-buried in the beast’s skull.

Why did you choose this world? the creature asked.

The primarch saw its throat quiver with the effort of speech, but no human words left the trembling jaws.

‘Does that matter?’ Lorgar wondered. His own voice emerged from the snarling vox-grille in the mouth of his helm. ‘I do not see why it would.’

From orbit, you must have known several things: you cannot breathe the air of this world, nor is there any sign of life upon its surface. Yet you chose to land and journey across it.

‘I saw the ruins. A city drowned in the dust plains.’

Very well,it said, as if expecting such an answer. The creature hunched its shoulders against the wind, turning its head to shield its swollen eye. From its spine and shoulder blades rose several black pinions of burned bone – an angel’s wings, with no muscles or feathers.

‘What are you?’ Lorgar asked.

The beast’s tongue bled as it licked its armoury of teeth. You know what I am.

‘Do I?’ The primarch towered above any mortal man, but Ingethel was taller still, rising high on its coiled tail. ‘I know you are a creature incarnated without a soul. I see nothing of the same life I see in humanity. No aura. No glimmer in the core of your being. But I do not know what you are; only what you are not.’

The wind picked up, tearing at the parchment scrolls fastened to Lorgar’s war plate. He let the storm claim them, not watching as they were ripped away, flapping in the air. A retinal warning flashed by the edge of his right eye, it was proclaiming another fall in the temperature. Was night falling? Nothing had changed in the sky above; no sun could be seen, let alone one that seemed to be setting. Lorgar cancelled the warning with a blink at the pulsating rune, just as his armour began to hum louder. The back-mounted generator growled as it churned out more power, entering a void-thaw cycle.

‘It is over two hundred degrees below the point water would freeze,’ he said to the monster. ‘Almost as cold as naked space.’

Another reason I wonder why you chose to walk upon this world.

Lorgar bared his teeth behind the granite-grey faceplate. ‘I am armoured to survive such extremes. What are you, to stand here and ignore an atmosphere cold enough to turn blood to ice in the time it takes the human heart to beat a single pulse?’

This is where the realm of flesh and spirit meet. Physical laws mean nothing here. There is no limit on what might be. That is Chaos. Endless possibility.

Lorgar took a deep breath of the clean, recyc-scrubbed air of his war plate. It tasted of ritual cleansing oils, coppery in his sinuses. ‘So I could breathe here? I would not freeze?’

You are unique among the Anathema’s sons. All of your brothers are whole, Lorgar. You alone are lost. They have mastered their gifts since birth. Your own mastery will come with understanding. When it does, you will have the strength to reshape entire worlds on a whim.

Lorgar shook his head. ‘I am bred from the best of humanity, but I am still human. You may stand unarmoured in this storm. It would destroy me in a moment. We are too different.’

The creature faced the primarch, its swollen eye cataracted by a film of red grit. Only one difference exists between the warp and the flesh. In the realm of flesh, sentient life is born ensouled. In the realm of raw thought, all life is soulless. But both are alive. The Born and the Neverborn, on both sides of reality. Destined for symbiosis. Destined for union.

The primarch crouched, letting dust fall through his gauntleted fingers. ‘Neverborn. I have studied the history of my species, Ingethel. That is no more than a poetic word for ‘‘daemon’’.’

The creature turned its back to the wind again, but said nothing.

‘What is this world called?’ Lorgar looked up, but did not rise. The dust hissed away in the racing wind, leaving his fingers in a gritty stream.

The eldar called it ‘‘Ycressa’’ before the Fall. After the birth of Slaa Neth, She Who Thirsts, it was named ‘‘Shanriatha’’.