The primarch gave a soft laugh.

You know the meaning of this word?

‘I learned the eldar tongue when my Legion first met them. Yes, I know the meaning of the word. It means ‘‘never forgotten’’.’

The daemon flicked a slit tongue over its maw, heedless of the bloody scratches it inflicted upon itself. You have met the soul-broken?

‘The soulbroken?’

The eldar.

Lorgar rose to his feet, brushing the last of the dust away. ‘The Imperium has encountered them many times. Some expeditionary fleets have clashed with them, to drive them from Imperial space. Others have passed in peace. My brother Magnus was always one of the more lenient when encountering them.’ He hesitated for a moment, turning to the creature. ‘Your kind know of my brother Magnus, do they not?’

The gods themselves know Magnus, Lorgar. His name is threaded through destiny’s web as often as your own.

The Word Bearer looked back to the horizon. ‘That gives me little comfort.’

It will, in time. Speak of the soulbroken.

He continued, slower now. ‘My Legion encountered them not long after we sailed from Colchis the very first time. A fleet of elder, their vessels built of bone, drifting through the void powered by immense solar sails. I met with their farseers, to determine their place in Mankind’s galaxy. During those weeks, I mastered their tongue.’

Lorgar took another breath, thinking back to that time. ‘It was easy to despise them. Their inhumanity made them cold; their skin stank of bitter oil and alien sweat, and their vaunted wisdom came at the cost of sneering condescension. What right did a dying breed have to judge us inferior? I asked them this, and they had no answer.’

He laughed again, the same gentle sound. ‘They named us mon-keigh, their term for so-called ‘‘lesser races’’. And yet, while they were easy to hate, there was much to admire in them, as well. Their existence is a tragic one.’

And what of your Legion?

‘We destroyed them,’ the primarch admitted. ‘At great cost, in both warships and loyal lives. They care for nothing but survival, the ferocious need to continue their existence saturates their whole culture. None of them ever die easily, nor do they fall cleanly.’

He paused for a moment. ‘Why do you name them ‘‘soul-broken’’?’

If such a thing as Ingethel could be said to smile, it did so now. You know what this place is. Not this world, but this whole region of space, where gods and mortals meet. A goddess was born here. Slaa Neth. She Who Thirsts.

Lorgar looked to the sky, watching the cosmic afterbirth raging above. He knew without being told that this storm would rage forever. And it would spread, over the coming centuries, engulfing ever more solar systems. It would spread far and wide, opening to peer into the galaxy’s core like a god’s staring eye.

‘I am listening,’ he said quietly.

In her genesis, brought about by the eldar’s worship, she claimed the spirits of the entire race. They are the soulbroken. When any mortal dies, its spirit drifts into the warp. It is the way of things. But when the eldar die, they are pulled right into the maw of the goddess they betrayed. She thirsts for them, for they are her children. She drinks them as they die.

Together, the daemon and the Emperor’s son began to move west. Lorgar moved against the wind, his helmed head lowered as he listened to the creature’s psychic speech. Ingethel closed its eyes as best as its deformed face allowed, its slithering passage leaving a sidewinder trail in the dust.

The marks they left didn’t last long, for the storm soon obliterated all evidence of their passing.

‘Something you said, it matches the Old Ways of Colchis.’ He quoted verbatim from the texts of the very religion he’d once overthrown in the name of Emperor-worship. ‘It is said that ‘‘upon death, the unshackled soul drifts into the infinite, to be judged by thirsting gods’’.’

Ingethel made a choking, coughing gargle. It took Lorgar a moment to realise the creature was laughing.

It is the core of a million human faiths throughout your species’ lifespan. The Primordial Truth is in humanity’s blood. You all reach for it. You all know that something awaits after death. The faithful, the loyal, will be judged kindly and reside in their gods’ domains. The faithless, the unbelievers, will drift through the aether, serving as prey for the Neverborn. The warp is the end of all spirits. It is the destination of every soul.

‘That is hardly the Heaven promised in most human faiths,’ Lorgar felt his lip curling.

No. But it is the same hell your species has always feared.

The primarch couldn’t argue with that.

You wish to see the ruins of this world,Ingethel weaved as it slithered alongside him.

‘This was once a grand city.’ Lorgar could make out the first fallen towers on the horizon, shrouded in generations of carmine dust. Whatever tectonic devastation had claimed this world long ago dragged the city into a crater, spilling its spires to the ground. What protruded from the earth now resembled the ribcage of some long-dead beast.

These ruins were never a true city. When the soulbroken fled the goddess’s birth, the survivors boarded vast domed platforms of living bone, carrying the remnants of their species into the stars on a final exodus.

‘Craftworlds. I have seen one,’ Lorgar kept trudging forward, into the wind. ‘It was magnificent, in its own alien, chilling way.’

Ingethel’s chittery laugh wasn’t quite stolen by the wind. Many of the fledgling craftworlds failed to escape Slaa Neth’s birth scream. They dissolved in the void, or fell to die on the faces of these abandoned worlds.

Lorgar slowed in his pace, casting a glance at the daemon. ‘We walk to the grave of a craftworld?’

Ingethel rasped another laugh from its malformed jaws. You are here to witness wonders, are you not?

AND SO THEY came to a dead city, fallen from the void to bury itself in the world’s lifeless dust.

Red-stained bone architecture reached as far as the eye could see, jutting from the fundament with all the grace of a mouth filled by shattered teeth. Lorgar and his guide stood at the crater’s lip, staring down into the grave of the alien void city.

The primarch was silent for some time, listening to the howl of the wind and the accompanying grit-rattle against his armour. When he spoke, he didn’t break his gaze from the ancient annihilation below.

‘How many died here?’

Ingethel raised itself higher, peering down with its foul eyes. Four arms spread in a grand gesture, as if laying claim to everything the daemon beheld.

This was craftworld Zu’lasa. Two hundred thousand souls burst in the moment Slaa Neth was born. Unguided, with madness rampant in its own living core, the craftworld fell.

Lorgar felt a small smile take hold. ‘Two hundred thousand. How many in the entire eldar empire?’

A whole species. Trillions. A decillion. A tredecillion. A goddess was born in the brains of every living eldar, and tore itself into the realm of cold space and warm flesh.

The daemon hunched itself, leaning with all four arms on the crater’s edge. I sense your emotions, Lorgar. Pleasure. Awe. Fear.

‘I have no love for the galaxy’s xenos breeds,’ the primarch confessed. ‘The eldar failed to grasp the truth of reality, and I feel no sorrow for them. Merely pity that any being can die in ignorance.’ He took a breath, still staring down at the buried craftworld. ‘How many of these failed to escape the goddess’s birth?’

A great many. Even now, some drift in the warp’s tides – the silent homes of memories and alien ghosts.

Lorgar ignored the wind tearing at his cloak as he took his first step on the crater’s slope.