It crawled closer. Two of its fingers broke against the ground. Congealing magma oozed from the stumps, blackening as it dried.

‘I know you can hear me,’ the primarch kept his voice calm. His crozius hammer flared with energy, lightning sparking in a mad dance over its spiked head. ‘But you cannot answer, can you?’

He took another step backwards. In response, the god’s statue gave another soundless roar.

‘I see you cannot.’ The primarch’s smile faltered. ‘Nothing is left to you but this dull ache of unquenchable hatred. That is almost tragic.’

Lorgar.

Ingethel? He reached for the daemon’s voice. Ingethel? I have found… something. An echo. A wraith. I believe I will put it out of its misery.

It is an Avatar of Kaela Mensha Khaine.

Lorgar nearly shrugged. The name means nothing to me.

The war god of the soulbroken. You have disturbed the city’s heart, bringing living warmth to the coldest of places.

He returned the psychic equivalent of a snort. Whatever it once was, it is dying now. It has been dying for a long time, entombed beneath this poisonous soil.

As you say.A pause. A sense of amusement. Lorgar. Behind you.

The primarch turned from the crawling god, to face the slender figures walking from the gritty wind. He could see nothing in the way of detail; they were silhouettes in the storm, drifting closer, curved blades in their hands.

A dozen, two dozen, all ghosting closer. Not a single one of them betrayed the warm resonance of living sentience.

‘Mon-keigh,’ whispered the wind. ‘Sha’eil, Sha’eil, Sha’eil.’

He knew the word. Sha’eil. Hell. A place of absolute evil.

Lorgar blasted each of the silhouettes apart with focused projections of psychic force. It took no more than a moment’s focus. Heat haze shimmered in the wake of their discorporation – the primarch laughed as he realised he was wasting his strength on mirages.

A groaning, grinding moan rang out from behind. Lorgar turned again, in time to see the god’s statue finally rising to its knees. From the red sand, it drew forth an ancient and cracked blade. Through clenched teeth that wheezed with ash, it coughed its first words.

‘Suin Daellae,’ growled the withered god. The blade in its hands, used more as a crutch than a weapon, streamed with unhealthy black smoke, but didn’t burst into flame.

Lorgar watched the trembling creature with a cautious eye. Suin Daellae, he sent to his distant guide. I am not familiar with the words.

The Doom that Wails. It is the name of the blade in its hands.

Lorgar watched the Avatar topple again, crashing onto its hands and knees. I almost feel pity for the thing.

He was aware of the daemon taking form behind him, shaping itself from the wind, but felt no compunction to turn and face it.

You should not pity it, Lorgar. There is a lesson in this.

The primarch was sure there was, but he cared little for such unsubtle teachings. The Avatar’s skin cracked and peeled away by each of the statue’s joints.

‘I am ending this,’ he said aloud.

As you wish,Ingethel’s words drifted back.

Lorgar stepped forward, his mace heavy in his hands.

Remember this moment, Lorgar. Remember it for what it is, and what it stands for.

He drew closer to the collapsing statue and raised his crozius high, every inch the image of an executioner.

The Avatar’s cracking hand gripped his armour greave. Another of its fingers broke off.

‘I will end the misery of your ignorance,’ said Lorgar, and let the hammer fall.

A SINGLE STRIKE. A blow to the back of the head.

The crash of iron against stone. The hiss of dust captured by the wind. The rattle of grit against sealed ceramite.

There is a lesson here.

On the red soil, an outline of black ash marked the shape of a god’s grave.

Lorgar. Do you see it?

Lorgar turned back to the daemon. Ingethel was slavering, its jaws dripping with clear saliva that somehow failed to crystallise in the intense cold.

Do you see? it asked, unblinking. A divine being can be as ignorant, as lost, as blind as any mere mortal. They can be as stubborn in their defiance, and just as grave a threat to the truth. Look at the revenant you destroyed – an echo of a faith that failed long ago. Now it is gone, this world can heal, untainted by false and heathen belief. Do you see?

The irritation left his vox-grille as a raucous grunt. ‘You asked that question of my son, Argel Tal, and I do not wish for the same blunt instruction. Yes, Ingethel. I see.’

Even a god may die, Lorgar.

He laughed again. ‘Subtlety is poison to you, isn’t it?’

Even a god may die. You will remember those words, before the end.

The daemon’s silent tone gave him pause. ‘You speak of the end as if you know its outcome.’

I have walked the paths of possibility. I have seen what might be, and what is almost certain to be. But one cannot see what will be, until it has become what was.

Lorgar no longer felt like laughing. ‘What is most likely, then? How will this end?’

The daemon licked its maw clean of dark ash and red dust. It ends as it began, Emperor’s son. It ends in war.

TWO WORDS WERE all it took.

‘Show me.’

PART THREE

IN WAR

SIX

THE ULTIMATE GATE

‘I KNOW THIS place,’ he whispered into the silence. ‘This is the Eternity Gate.’

Lorgar stared down the endless hall – wide enough to admit a thousand men marching abreast, long enough to house every banner of honour from each of the Emperor’s regiments. A hundred thousand banners, just in range of his genhanced eyesight. A million reaching beyond it. Two million. Three.

More and more and more, as far as the eye could see, proudly heralding world after world clutched in the Imperium’s grip. Each world raised countless regiments, their war flags hanging here to form an infinite tapestry. The hall itself, stretching for hours upon hours, was part cathedral, part museum, part sanctum of honour.

In the furthest reaches, shadowed by the darkness abounding, stood two wolf-masked Warhound Titans, their city-killing guns trained upon the marble steps leading towards the great gate they guarded.

The portal itself defied description. Words such as ‘‘door’’ and ‘‘gateway’’ implied comprehensible scope, something mortal minds could fathom without difficulty. This was no such thing. To construct such a barricade must have taken a full quarter of the remaining adamantium deposits on Mars, even before the ornate gold was added in layers upon the outer core of dense ceramite plating.

A barrier so grand, so impossible in scale and majesty, could only be protecting the secrets of one soul, above all others. Lorgar had been here but rarely, for the Eternity Gate was the portal to his father’s innermost sanctum, where the Emperor kept his personal genetic laboratory sealed away from his sons and servants.

For a time, Lorgar stood beneath the company banners of an Army regiment hailing from a world called Valhalla. The imagery upon the flags was one of a white world and cloaked men raising pennants in the Emperors service. Lorgar had never set foot upon their world and wondered how far it lay from Terra in the night sky. Perhaps its people were as cold and unwelcoming as the frost upon which they trod.

‘Why did you show me this?’ he asked, turning from the hanging banners.

Ingethel slid from the shadows, the fur around its swollen eye dark and wet with secreted fluids.

‘Are you weeping?’ Lorgar asked the thing.

No. I am bleeding.